Contents
Text
Illustrations
5 Preface
10 1.1
In the beginning was the phrase
11 1.2
Polemic before Kruschev
16 2.1
Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles
17 2.2
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
19 3
Secondary School, Hunstanton
21
Le Corbusier; Marseilles (France),
Unite d' Habitation. 1948-54
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Chicago (Illinois, USA),
Alumni Memorial Hall
(Illinois Institute of Technology). 1945-47
Alison and Peter Smithson; Hunstanton (England),
4.1 Secondary School. 1949-54
Progress to a-formalism
44 4.2
Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
45 4.3
Manifesto
49
50
52
52
53
54
56
57
6
(England), competition design. 1951
Alison and Peter Smithson;
Hon ° onc l on (England), Golden-Lane
S ' n 9, com Petition design. 1952
Shpff uj d P f ter Smithson;
(Enol' e lJnivers ity Extensions
V 9 and) ' competition design. 1953
SheHiefd'un' 9 A ' a " Cordin 9 le yi
competition desfgm 1953 nS ' 0nS (En 9 land ^’
Pharm^ ^'"' ams 5 Beeston (Nottingham, Englai
ceutical Factory (dry processes block).
"“dir", 110 "! 51 " 0 '"
Rotte T S ^ Van den ^ roe ^ ar| d Jacob B Bakema
am (Holland), van den Broek House. 195c
R n xf^ n . es H van den Broek and Jacob B Bakema
rdam (Holland), Lijnbaan. 1953
32
41
58
61 5.1
Brute, non and other art
68 5.2
A note on ‘une architecture autre
70 5.3
The end of an old urbanism
77
78
78
79
79
80
82
83
Les Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly
6 2
Flats at Ham Common, London
89 6.3
The Brutalist style
93
94
95
95
96
102
7
Vladimir Bodiansky and ATBAT-Afrique;
Algiers, Mass Housing. 1953 onwards
Alison and Peter Smithson; Watford
(Hertfordshire, England), Sugden House. 1956
Alison and Peter Smithson;
Rural Housing Project for CIAM — X. 1955
William G Howell and John Partridge,
Rural Housing Project for CIAM - X. 1955
James Stirling; Rural Housing Project
for CIAM-X. 1955
Richard Llewelyn-Davies and John Weeks;
Rushbrooke (Suffolk, England), Village Housing. 1957
Denys Lasdun and Partners;
Bethnal Green, London (England),
Cluster-block. 1957—60
Alison and Peter Smithson;
Illustrations to Article ‘Cluster City’. 1957
Alison and Peter Smithson; Berlin-Hauptstadt
(Germany), competition design. 1958
Le Corbusier; La Sainte-Baume
(Bouches du Rhone, France),
Pilgrimage Centre (La Cite Permanente),
first project. 1948
Le Corbusier; Cap Martin (France),
Hotel ‘Roq et Rob’ project. 1949
Le Corbusier; Lake Constance (Switzerland),
Fueter House project. 1950
Le Corbusier; Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris, France),
‘Petite Maison de Weekend’. 1935
Le Corbusier; Neuilly (Paris, France),
Maisons Jaoul. 1956
James Stirling and James Gowan; Ham Common
(London, England), Langham House Development.
1958
107
John Voelcker; Arkley (Hertfordshire, England)
Lyttleton House. 1956
108
110
111
111
112
114
115
115
116
119
120
121
122
123
124
125 7
Hard cases: the Brick Brutalists
127 8.1
Istituto Marchiondi, Milan
130 8.2
Habitats: Halen, Harumi, Sheffield
134 9
Memoirs of a survivor
William G Howell, Gillian Howell and Stanley Amis;
Hampstead (London, England), Terrace Housing.
1956
Lyons, Israel and Ellis; London (England),
‘Old Vic’ Theatre Workshops. 1958
Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall; Gatwick (England),
Airport. 1957
Owen Luderand Partners; Catford
(London, England), Eros House. 1963
Sheppard, Robson and Partners;
Cambridge (England), Churchill College. 1964
Sir Basil Spence and Partners; Brighton (England),
University of Sussex. 1962/63
Peter Moro; London (England), Hille Furniture Shop.
1963 h
Denys Lasdun and Partners; London,
Flats in St James’s Place. 1961
London County Council Architect’s Department
(Housing Division); Roehampton (London, England),
Alton West Housing. 1959
Bresciani, Valdes, Castillo and Huidobro;
Santiago (Chile), Quinta Normal Housing. 1961-63
Andre Wogenscky; R6my-les-Ch(§vreuses (France),
Architect s Own House. 1957
Atelier 5 (Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber,
Rolf Hesterberg, Hans Hostettler,
Niklaus Morgenthaler, Alfredo Pini);
Rothrist (Switzerland), Alder House. 1958
Atelier 5 (Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber,
Rolf Hesterberg, Hans Hostettler,
Niklaus Morgenthaler, Alfredo Pini);
Thun (Switzerland), Factory. I960
Le Corbusier; St Di6 (France), Factory. 1950
Walter Forderer, Rolf Otto, Hans Zwimpfer;
Aesch (Switzerland), School. 1962
8
137
138
140
142
144
146
148
150
153 U
158
164
166
174
176
177
182
189
191
Sverre Fehn and Geir Grung; Maihaugen
(Lillehammer, Norway), Museum Extension. 1959
Luigi Figini and Gino Pol I ini; Milan (Italy),
Church of the Madonna dei Poveri. 1956
Johannes H van den Broek and Jacob B Bakema;
Nagele (Holland), Reformed Church. 1960
Sigurd Lewerentz; Stockholm (Sweden),
Markuskyrka. 1960
Oswald Mathias Ungers; Cologne (Germany),
Architect’s Own House. 1959
Colin St John Wilson and Alex Hardy;
Cambridge (England),
Extensions to School of Architecture. 1959
Sir Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson
(with Patrick Hodgkinson); Cambridge (England),
Harvey Court Hostel. 1962
Sheppard, Robson and Partners;
Cambridge (England), Churchill College,
Fellows’ Flats. 1960
Vittoriano Vigan6; Milan (Italy),
Istituto Marchiondi. 1959
Aldo van Eyck; Amsterdam (Holland),
Orphanage School. 1958—60
Paul Rudolph; New Haven (Connecticut, USA),
Yale University, Married Students’ Housing. 1962
Atelier 5 (Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber,
Rolf Hesterberg, Hans Hostettler,
Niklaus Morgenthaler, Alfredo Pini);
Berne (Switzerland), Siedlung Halen. 1961
Kiyonori Kikutake; Totsuka (Yokohama, Japan),
Tonogaya Apartments. 1956
Ikuta, Oki and Miyajima; Omiya (Saitama, Japan),
Fuji Juko Omiya Development. 1957
Kunio Mayekawa; Harumi (Tokyo, Japan),
Apartment Block. 1958
Sheffield City Architect’s Department
(J Lewis Womersley, City Architect;
Jack Lynn, Ivor Smith and Frederick Nicklin,
designers); Sheffield (England), Park Hill
Development. 1961
Alison and Peter Smithson; London (England),
Economist Cluster. 1964
James Stirling and James Gowan,
Leicester (England), University
Engineering-laboratories. 1963
193 Index of Names in the Text
195 Photographers
9
Bengt Edman and Unnn,»Lj ,
(Sweden), private house, 19^ m ’ Uppsa,a
Design for facade
1.1 In the beginning was the phrase...
One of the more ironical aspects of the recent his¬
tory of architecture is that the invention of the term
'The New Brutalism’ should already be shrouded in
historical mystery, in spite of the fact that it occur¬
red as recently as the early nineteen-fifties and un¬
der conditions which should have rendered the whole
process visible to any historian who was interested.
The mystification derives from two simple circum¬
stances: one, that the term was coined, in essence,
before there existed any architectural movement for
it to describe; two, that it was then re-minted to de-
* " be 3 Part / Cular movement, to which it adhered for
reasons that were, in part, so trivial and ridiculous
tha V Y I , n0t be taken seriou sly until later. By
that time the term The New Brutalism' had come to
L a n«l°s r soTfr 50 P ° rtentous that ^e explana-
S niCkname ”' WOuld ^ve seemed
certainly tn^ 0 ' V™ W ° rd ‘ Brutalist ’ seem ® fairly
Asolund y H HaVe b u 6en HanS As P lund > son of Gunnar
trm in a l KiS aCC ° Unt of the inv ention of the
in the -a e u-! r t0 EnC de Mar ® which w as reprinted
Upps a tl7 9 T„ g 11 8 t , C; d dss ^ i "3 »
! n a mi >dly sarcastic way 'Neo BmtTt w!!^ tHem
,sh word for ‘New Brutalists'l Th t i^ (th ® Swed '
at a jollification together with ^ f ° L° Wing s ™mer,
among whom were Michael VenWs" E " 9 ' isb friends -
Graeme Shankland, the term „ ’ ° l,Ver Cox and
! n a jocular fashion. When I vision ?! ent,oned a 9ain
«n London last year they tnu d ^ Same friends
brought the word back with 318 that they had
that it had spread like wildfire anrtt!, 0 En9 ' and ' and
what astoundingly been adoot h bad| some -
tion of younger Engli^farchitecu!”^ 3 fac '
But if this account of •
oorate, the version of ^spre"^" °p ' ™ ^ ac '
leading (though Asplund could 1'^ " 9 and is mis -
Brutalist' is not the sa m ^
and '» was the latter phrase th* u 7 Brutalis "’.
been adopted by a younger f a ^ had S P read and
g lf f? r ?nce is not merely of t°" E " 9land - The
Brutalist’ is a stylistic \2 ? f ° f WOrd s: 'Neo-
Neo-Gothic, whereas 't
Brutahst pjuase^'^n the
re.
10
Neverthless, the term ‘Brutalist’ undoubtedly was
brought back to England by the three architects
named by Asplund, and from them passed into the
common colloquial vocabulary at the two main cen¬
tres of architectural discussion in London at that
time: the Architectural Association (a professional
club with an attached school) and the Architect’s
Department of the London County Council, which
was just about to embark on its period of greatest
productivity. Within this context of professional gos¬
sip and discussion, however, the word ‘Brutalist’
was used in a rather specialised sense (for polemi¬
cal reasons which will appear later). Whatever As¬
plund meant by it, the Cox-Shankland connection
seem to have used it almost exclusively to mean
Modern Architecture of the more pure forms then
current, especially the work of Mies van der Rohe.
The most obstinate protagonists of that type of ar¬
chitecture at the time in London were Alison and
Peter Smithson, designers of the Miesian school at
Hunstanton which is generally taken to be the first
Brutalist building. The term ‘Brutalist’ was doubtless
applied to their ideas lightly and in passing, but it
stuck to them for two reasons: firstly, because they
were prepared to make something serious of it; and,
secondly, because Peter Smithson was known to his
friends during his student days as‘Brutus’from a sup¬
posed resemblance to classical busts of the Roman
hero.
This last circumstance seemed so ridiculous that it
spread about the world as fast as the Smithsons’
architectural reputation: even before Peter Smijth-
son s first visit to America, Sigfried Giedion’s stu-
/iid S . !! ere m Possession of a garbled version
L™. a ISm equals B ™tus plus Alison”), but the sa-
wrote ,f 0 rr ® s P° adent in ‘Architectural Design’ who
surplv h u eter ’ s oioknsme been Fido, it would
PC M w? ?” ' Th8 N8 ” " had mi.sed th.
phrase to 6 "- Bm ' 1 bson finally committed the
been built 7"* Dec ember 1953 “In fact, had this
the‘New Bn 7°° ? haVe been the first ex P onent of
already ^ ,n En9 ' and ■ ■ 1 the situation had
could have se^edT n ° W ° rd but ‘ Brutalism ’
a " d many ^ tHe Smithson f
thev must ^ e,r 9 ener ation urgently felt
tecture to express rtT th f y Had ’ aS yet ’ no archi ‘
such did not really exisUnD Brutalism aS
Won which made it nf December 1953, the situa-
which needs to be exam* 8 ^ d ' d e *' St ’ 3 situation
how it was that a q ,' ned m order to understand
E. 9 'i 8 hco„S s a ho S u :! d h iSh *"•». dropped into an
wide echoes. ecome a slogan with world-
1 'Arrh'l° C . Ura ' ^ ov, °' v ’> August 1956
Architectural Design’, December
1953
.*•
1.2 Polemic before Kruschev
The English context into which the Swedish phrase
was dropped was a violent and sustained polemic on
style, such as England had not seen since the nine¬
teenth century, though very little of this polemic
reached the public print at the time. In part, this was
a classic quarrel of the generations, but the quarrel
was focussed and concentrated almost entirely with¬
in one organisation, the Architect’s Department of
the London County Council, which was almost the
only place where newly-graduated architects could
find work in London in the early Fifties, and the quar¬
rel was kept open and alive by one dominant factor —
that the social conscience of the older architects in
the Department had, in many cases, hardened into an
acceptance of Communist doctrine . 3
Such a development might well have been antici¬
pated — social conscience in architecture is an Eng¬
lish tradition that goes back to William Morris, and
the very earliest works of the LCC Architect’s De¬
partment after its foundation had been mostly in such
‘social’ fields as housing. In addition, the rise of Mo¬
dern Architecture in England in the thirties had been
qreatly influenced both by the social attitudes of
distinguished refugee-architects like Gropius, and
by the ‘Popular Front’ politics of the Spanish Civil
War (an event which left permanent scars on the
conscience of the English Intelligentsia). Many ar¬
chitects who returned to their calling (or their train¬
ing) after World War II, had fought that war to make
the world safe for some form of benevolent social¬
ism and they were heavily committed to the Welfare-
State ideology of the Labour Government which
swept to power in the first post-war election in 1945.
Not unnaturally they looked for inspiration to coun¬
tries that could offer examples of advanced Welfare-
State architecture - and this was one of the reasons
why architects like Oliver Cox and Graeme Shank-
land were in Sweden talking to Hans Asplund, as
mentioned in the previous chapter.
But in addition to this interest in Sweden, there was
also a conscious attempt, by architects committed
to the Communist line, to .create an English ^qui-
vn | on + of the Socialist-Realist architecture pro -
oo uadsd in Russia by Zhdanov’s architectural sup¬
porters Within the LCC Architect’s Department, at-
to enforce an Anglo-Zhdanov line were con¬
ducted with a grotesque mixture of Stalinist con¬
spiratorial techniques (as was also the opposition to
them) and the traditional methods of British snob¬
bery. Thus, disapproval of the architectural views of
3 For the purposes of this discussion, ’Communist’ is taken to
mean an acceptance of Marxist doctrine on aesthetics, without
iZl'i «. — B ';*”
'Colin A St John Wilson (working in the LCC Hous¬
ing Division at that time, like many other architects
who will appear in this book) was expressed through
the time-honoured technique of snubbing — one of
the senior architects who had always previously ad¬
dressed him by his nick-name of ‘Sandy’, took care
to address him after the hardening of the party line
as Colin, the first name by which he is never ad¬
dressed by his intimates.
This hardening of the architectural line by the Com¬
munists occupying the middle ranks of the LCC archi¬
tectural hierarchy stemmed partly from a genuine
conviction that something related to English nine¬
teenth-century brick-building was the correct ap¬
proach (for which they produced William Morris’s
‘Red House’ by Philip Webb as justification) and
partly from a defensive response to their own worse¬
ning situation. The post-war years had disappointed
the hopes of everybody, but for the Welfare archi¬
tects further disappointments followed with the fall
of the Labour Government in 1951, and the ridiculous
anti-Communist witch-hunts which were pursued into
all walks of life, even architecture. About the closing
stages of the People’s-Architecture period at the
LCC there hangs the unmistakable atmosphere of a
grand old British lost cause hurling its gentlemanly
defiance to the world. Early in December 1954 the
entrenched Communist members of the hierarchy
gave out the formal line on architecture in such detail
as the following: Buildings of four storeys or less
are to be considered as domestic in scale, and must
have pitched roofs, but those of greater height are
not domestic, and the form of roof is to be settled
by discussion in the department. Several younger
members of the Housing Division to whom this
‘ukase’ was directed, seriously considered giving in
their resignations, but they were saved from the
need for such action by no less a person than Mr
Kruschev himself, who — only a few days later — first
entered the world headlines with his intervention at
the All-Union Congress of Architects, an interven¬
tion that brought the Zhdanov line into official dis¬
favour, marked the beginning of the cultural thaw
in the USSR, and left advocates of Socialist-Realist
architecture all over the world without ideological
support.
But before Kruschev brought this architectural po¬
lemic to a sudden and unexpected close, a clear
and distinctive character had appeared in both par¬
ties, each with its array of fighting slogans, hero-
figures and cult-object buildings. The negative as¬
pects of the younger generation’s attitude may best
be summed up in the exasperated statement by
James Stirling: “Let’s face it, William Morris was a
Swede”. The factual accuracy of this statement
need not detain us here, it is its emotional truth as a
total rejection of the style of all forms of Welfare
architecture that is of consequence. The William
Morris revival, or People’s Detailing, or whatever
term was commonly employed to satirise attempts
to revive nineteenth-century brick-building techni-
ques, complete with small, shoulder-arched windows"
etc, was occasionally dignified by the grandiose title
\
11
sbnVRoph 0 ^ C ° UnCl1 Archi, ect's Department (Housing Divi-
Terrace h P °" ( , L ° ndon ' En S land ), Alton East Housing. 1953-56
Terrace-housing and low-rise apartments
‘The New Humanism’, which was in itself a rework¬
ing of a title invented (by the ‘Architectural Review’)
for the Swedish retreat from Modern Architecture:
The New Empiricism. Given the polemical circum¬
stance, the phrase The New Brutalism clearly has
strong elements of parody of both the other move¬
ments, which — in practice —are often very difficult
to tell apart when built. Both exhibited cottage-sized
aspirations, a style based on a sentimental regard
for nineteenth-century vernacular usages, with pitch¬
ed roofs, brick or rendered walls, window-boxes, bal¬
conies, pretty paintwork, a tendency to elaborate
woodwork detailing, and freely picturesque grouping
on the ground. The smaller housing in the Alton East
section of the LCC’s now-famous Roehampton Es¬
tate, though designed by Zhdanov precepts (albeit
completed after Kruschev’s revisions) could equally
well be a demonstration of the New Empiricism —
as Nikolaus Pevsner observed, its inspiration is
Swedish.
The introduction of Pevsner’s name at this point is .
appropriate, the kind of architecture to which the
young Brutalists objected had another ideological
support that was not swept away by Kruschev’s de¬
nunciations: the ‘Architectural Review’, whose en¬
thusiasm for picturesque planning at this time has
still not been forgiven by some of the Brutalist ge¬
neration. Throughout the war years Pevsner, and
others such as H F Clark, had been researching into
e origins and practice of English picturesque
p anning in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, and on this basis ‘Ivor de Wolfe’ (pseudo¬
nym of one of the ‘Review’s’ editors) was later to
emand a full-scale theory of ‘Townscape’! Such a
eory was to proceed from the ‘found’ or ‘given’
e ements of any planning problem, and by awarding
e ig est valuation to these elements, was even
more empiricist than Swedish housing-design of the
perio . uc an approach, which “judges every case
p n r ' ^ J T, .f r ^ S |.’ etc > stan ds on a firm tradition of
n |S 1 era ism, democracy and common law, but
° a ks°lutely trivial value to a younger
gen.,« ,o„ whom the giv9 „ e|ement$ of p ,| n .
in ruin<? Ua +h° n Seemed to b e social chaos, a world
what aDoe 6 ^ r ° sp ® ct °* nuc * ear annihilation, and
CteEt? H b ! * •bandonm.nt of
S S wL .1 ' dS on(h ' »< "»'r 0 'dO'S-
turbed them mo J aS ? ect of ,he situation that dis-
m,„dfundament,! com-
°f the place in all” (* \ t0 <consu,t the genius
m all , (a tag from Alexander Pope that
discipline 77 planning 6 landTcapT ° r k 9 - naMy *° ,H ° '
^is involved irregular am.,n* ’ 0r b ' S En9,ish fo "o
existing landscape and struck ° f buildin 9 s ' a "<* th
caI justification for free asv U ? S became a favo
adaptive techniques in 'urban^ n ° al p,annin 9 in b
of Raymond Unwin e u The 9a ^n-c
"><>->* distinguished a »-"Plo d!scus 8 7 d T„7h"s boJk (7
Frederick Gibberd; Harlow New Town (England), Housing a. The
Lawn. 1952
I
was much employed by the ‘Architectural Review’)
seemed to be employed to justify, even sanctify, a
willingness to compromise away every ‘real’ archi¬
tectural value, to surrender to all that was most pro¬
vincial and second-rate in British social and intel¬
lectual life. There were, of course, understandable
historical reasons for this ‘soft’ attitude on the part
of the middle-aged generation. They had been de¬
fending some version of the British way of life from
points all over the globe in World War II, but the
quality of that way of life was being steadily reduced
(especially in the arts) by isolation from those cen¬
tres, such as Paris, which had traditionally exercised
both a stimulating and a steadying influence on the
British Intelligentsia. —
Thus, in England, there had grown up during the war
a romantic and fashionably morbid school of land-
scape/townscape painting, exemplified by the work
of John Piper and Graham Sutherland, and the vision
of this school was influential in preparing a mood
of elegant despair that affected many branches of
British culture in the ensuing peace. Thus Piper, who
contributed a dust-jacket to the classic monument
of post-war intellectual self-pity, Cyril Conolly’s ‘The
Unquiet Grave’, also executed both the dust-jacket
and the illustrations to ‘The Castle’s on the Ground’,
a specimen example of wartime ‘home thoughts from
abroad’, a sentimental evocation (written in Cairo)
of the virtues and less damaging vices of Victorian
Suburbia, composed by the distinguished critic J M
Richards, also an editor of the‘Architectural Review’,
like Pevsner. This book in particular was regarded
by the young as a blank betrayal of everything that
Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for, and
a worse act of treachery in that it had been written
by the man whose ‘Introduction to Modern Architec¬
ture’, had indeed served to introduce many of them
to the art of architecture.
There can be no doubt that these wartime experien¬
ces had served Jo confuse the aims and blunt ihe
intellectual attack of the men to whom were entrust¬
ed such major enterprises as the design of the first
generation of New Towns, or the Festival of Britain
in 1951. The younger generation, viewing these works,
had the depressing sense that the drive was going
out of Modern Architecture, its pure dogma being di¬
luted by politicians and compromisers who had lost
their intellectual nerve. Young architects, of course,
were not the only members of their generation to
feel sentiments like this. Their revolt has been com¬
pared to the rise of the ‘Red-Brick’ novelists 5 and
the ‘Angry Young Men’ in the British theatre, but
while it is true that many of the Brutalists hail from
‘Red-Brick’ universities and hold the kind of absolute
and uncompromising views that characterise the
Angry Young Men, the fact remains that the first
t
5 ‘Red-Brick’ universities (so-called because of their preferred
building-material) are mainly of 19C origin, unlike the ancient
universities in Britain, such as Oxford or Cambridge, which are
mostly built of stone. The new universities have never onjoyed
the social status and political prestige of the ancient founda¬
tions, and they are therefore one of the main breeding grounds
of social, political and intellectual protest in Britain.
Sir Hugh Casson (architektomsche
Leitung): Festival of Britain,
London/England, 1951
Blick auf die Abteilung >Downstream<
i
6/7
Sir Hugh Casson (Director of Architecture); London (England),
Festival of Britain. 1951
6
The Sea-and-Ships Pavilion (designer: Sir Basil Spence) seen
from the Dome of Discovery (Ralph Tubbs)
appearance of the New Brutalist attitude precedes
by some years the first ‘Angry’ play, ‘Look Back in
Anger’, and they flatly rejected the provincial back¬
ground of which novelists like John Wain and Kings¬
ley Amis made so much.
Instead, they deliberately sought out non-provincial
standards and measured themselves against Inter¬
national figures. Refusing empiricist compromise or
picturesque traditionalism, they set up as their stan¬
dards men like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe,
1
Philip Johnson (still in his Miesian phase), Alvar
Aalto or Ernesto Rogers. They rejected their im¬
mediate predecessors in Britain, except perhaps
Wells Coates, always true to a Parisian aesthetic,
and Berthold Lubetkin, the distinguished Russian re¬
fugee whose political convictions had never led him
to compromise with vernacular standards, much to
the embarrassment of other Communist architects
in Britain. As early as CIAM VIII in 1951, the young
had invaded the congress in order to sit at the feet
of ‘grands maitres’ whose views they could respect
(whatever may have happened later) in preference
to listening to their English seniors whom they were
fast coming to despise.
At the same time they seemed to be setting out to
find a historical basis for their architectural convic¬
tions outside the English tradition. Here again, Pevs¬
ner was an authority they had to reject. Not only did
his ‘Pioneers of the Modern Movement’ place a very
high valuation on the English contribution to the
rise of Modern Architecture, but he had also, in an
essay published in April 1954, made a strong case
for the continuing use of picturesque methods even
in architects like Le Corbusier.' This article was
consciously intended as a contribution to the public
debate on the Picturesque then in process: it was
written in reply to a radio talk in which Basil Taylor
(an aesthetic philosopher then in vogue) had at¬
tacked the corrosive influence of picturesque prac¬
tice, and Pevsner provoked a spirited reply fro™
Alan Colquhoun, an important, though largely un¬
published, contributor to the architectural ideas o
the younger generation. 6
What this generation sought was historical justifi¬
cations for its own attitudes, and it sought them
in two main areas of history — the traditions of Mo¬
dern Architecture itself, and the far longer traditions
of classicism. In the first tradition, they laid particu¬
lar emphasis on the form-givers — not only on Le
Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, but also on such
figures as Rietveld (whose Schroder house was de¬
scribed by Peter Smithson as “the only truly canoni¬
cal modern building in Europe” — a striking and
suggestive turn of phrase) or Hugo Haring, whose
farm at Garkau they knew only through a tiny illus¬
tration in a relatively obscure book, Bruno Taut’s
‘Modern Architecture’, of 1930. Their degree of so¬
phistication about the history of Modern Architec¬
ture was remarkable by world standards at the time;
6 Taylor’s radio text was never printed. Pevsner's article ap¬
peared in 'Architectural Review’, April 1954, a correction from
Taylor in the June issue, and Colquhoun's letter (with Pevsner’s
reply) in 'Architectural Review’, July 1954.
14
their sophistication about classicism was remarkable
for its peculiar interests rather than its extent. Most
of this generation had passed through some form
of rundown Beaux-Arts training (though Peter Smith-
son enrolled deliberately at the Royal Academy
schools in London, in the hope of acquiring a more
convincing form of classical expertise), all had had
their interest in classicism confirmed by their read¬
ings in Le Corbusier, but all came very directly under
I the influence of the brilliant revival of Palladian
studies in England in the late FortiesVeither directly
through Rudolf Wittkower and his book‘Architectural
Principles in the Age of Humanism’, or through the
teaching of his outstanding pupil, Colin Rowe.
Like many others among them, Rowe believed tha t
there was direct architectural relevance between the
classical past~and the work of twentieth-centu ry
masters. Thus, while Ruth Olitsky and John Voefcker
could say (in ‘Architectural Design’ 7 ): “It is seldom
that chance timing in the publication of two books
has been so fortunate as in the case of Dr Wittko-
wer’s ‘Architectural Principles in the Age of Human¬
ism’ and Le Corbusier’s ‘Modulor’ ... each book il-
luminates the significance of the other, and through
them both it becomes possible to see the origins of
many issues which are very much alive among archi¬
tects at the present time,”
Rowe was taking this bridge-building technique be¬
tween anc ient and modern m uch further...in t wo in ¬
fluential essays (publi shed, ironically enough, in The
Architectural Review’) entitled, ‘The Mathematics
of the Ideal Villa’ (comparing Palladio and Le
Corbusier) and ‘Mannerism and Modern Architec¬
ture’ (a wider search for precedents in what was
then an intellectually fashionable period of art
history). Somewhere in this amalgamation of ancient
and modern exemplars of architectural order, there
was thought to lie the one real and true architecture
implied in the title of Le Corbusier’s first book ‘Vers
une architecture’, the image of a convincing and
coherent architecture that their elders had lost, and
their teachers could no longer find. In spite of the
accusations of Formalism levelled at them by their
elders (some seemed to revel in the label — a small
house by John Voelcker was published as an exam¬
ple of ‘The New Formalism’, with his approval, and
a garland of references to Wittkower, Palladio and
the Modulor) this generation of architects just ap¬
proaching the age of thirty at the moment when the
Smithsons accepted the title Brutalist, turned con¬
sciously to the great form-givers of their time for
inspiration - to Frank Lloyd Wright, but above all to
Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.
7 'Architectural Design', October 1954 - the tendency to combine
all sorts of disparate ‘Classical’ authorities exemplified here, is
entirely typical of the British attitude to ‘The Classical Tradi¬
tion’. In the British view, the importance of that tradition lay in
its abstract intellectual disciplines (proportion, symmetry) and
habits of mind (clarity, rationalism) far more than matters of de¬
tailed style. Thus, the revival of interest in the primitive Neo-
Classicism of Lord Burlington’s Palladian Revival (1715 — 1750) led
Voelcker to propose ‘Palladian’ plans for electrical generating
stations, but the Palladianism was restricted to an abstract plan¬
ning diagram, and did not involve even room-shapes, let alone
the detailing of the elevations.
15
For illustrations see page 21-27
2.1 Unite d’Habitation, Marseilles
Behind all aspects of the New Brutalism, in Britain
and elsewhere, lies one undisputed architectural
fact: the concrete-work of Le Corbusier’s ‘Unite
d’Habitation’ at Marseilles. And if there is one single
verbal formula that has made the concept of Bru¬
talism admissible in most of the world’s western
languages, it is that Le Corbusier himself described
that concrete-work as ‘beton brut’. Word and build¬
ing stand together in the psychological history of
post-war architecture, with an authority granted to
few others concepts. In the early years of the fifties,
few buildings anywhere in the world had such a hold
on the imagination of younger architects, especially
in the English-speaking countries, and — above all —
in England itself. It was the largest single building
of architectural importance in course of erection in
Europe at the time, and it was the first genuinely
post-war building, in the sense that its innovations
separated it definitively from Modern Architecture
before 1939.
However naively Le Corbusier may have played into
the hands of Marxist critics like Andte Lurpat by
saying “It is the building I have wanted to create
for thirty years”, the ‘Unite’ was unmistakably a build¬
ing of the fifties; it was not conceived in some re¬
worked version of a pre-war style (as were, for in¬
stance, the various second-hand ‘exercices de style’
of the buildings for the Festival of Britain). The cru¬
cial innovation of the ‘Unite’ was not its heroic scale,
nor its originalities in sectional organisation, nor its
sociological pretensions — it was, more than any¬
thing else, the fact that Le Corbusier had abandoned
the pre-war fiction that reinforced concrete was a
precise, ‘machine-age’ material.
That fiction had been maintained, even in the thir¬
ties, by two main devices: either by rendering over
the roughness and inaccuracies of concrete with
plaster and paint; or by lavishing on it skilled labour
and specialised equipment beyond anything the
economics of the building industry normally permit¬
ted ... and even this did not always succeed, as
faults and errors of execution in the work of Auguste
Perret can show. Le Corbusier at Marseilles, under
the pressure of economic and political circumstan¬
ces that forced him to abandon his original steel¬
framed design for the ‘Unite’, reacted with his custo¬
mary originality and acute sense of the mood of the
hour, and decided to recognise that concrete starts
life as a messy soup of suspended dusts, grits and
slumpy aggregate, mixed and poured under condi¬
tions subject to the vagaries of weather and human
fallibility, and left to harden in formwork whose car¬
pentry rarely (in France) attained the level of preci¬
sion required in the construction of a garden fence.
Perret, or Freyssinet, under theirspecially favourable
circumstances, might have been able to make it
otherwise, but for Le Corbusier to expect anything
better on an open site in southern France in the late
forties, would have been an idle and irresponsible
dream.
Yet his appraisal and resolution of this problem was
the very opposite of defeatist. Out of a superficially
discouraging situation, Le Corbusier conjured con¬
crete almost as a new material, exploiting its crudi¬
ties, and those of the wooden formwork, to produce
an architectural surface of a rugged grandeur that
seems to echo that of the well-weathered Doric col¬
umns of temples in Magna Graecia — it was not a
question of “Architecture is that which makes mag¬
nificent ruins”, the concrete work at Marseilles start¬
ed as a magnificent ruin even before the building
was completed. Nor was it simply a matter of ex¬
ploiting happy accident: the rough wooden form-
work which was allowed to impress its grain, knots
and blemishes on the face of the concrete was laid
in carefully-planned patterns of planking, which
broke the surface into large squares and thus cre¬
ated a kind of modern equivalent for rustication. The
coarseness of the surface, the pattern of the plank-
work and the scale of the building produced an ar¬
chitectural texture that was not only interesting in
itself but, under the hard glare of the Mediterranean
sun gave something of the effect of the coarse tra¬
vertine and giant scale of the apses of Michelange¬
lo’s St Peter’s in Rome, on which Le Corbusier had
written some of the most emotional prose in ‘Vers
une architecture’.
The Brutalists were not alone in seeing that in this
building, modern architecture had finally come to
terms with what northern Europe loosely calls ‘The
Mediterranean tradition’, a consummation humor¬
ously expressed in the form “the first modern build¬
ing that has room for cockroaches”. Without doubt,
it is one of the buildings in which Le Corbusier enters
most convincingly into the great and true tradition of
architecture as he understands it; the building in
which all the rhetorical consonances between mo¬
dern technology and ancient architecture in ‘Vers
une architecture’ most nearly come true. Indeed, Mar¬
seilles is where the promise of that book’s title is
fulfilled. The Brutalist generation in Britain never
tired of pointing out the title given to the English
translation — ‘Towards a New Architecture’ — falsi¬
fied Le Corbusier’s intentions (as did the original
title of the German translation also; ‘Kommende Bau-
kunst’). Reading ‘Vers une architecture’ as a sacred
text, they knew that it promised not anew architec¬
ture, but simply architecture as it had always
been and always would be, as Le Corbusier believed
the term had been understood by Perret, by Phidias,
by Mansart or Michelangelo. Right or wrong, Le Cor¬
busier had vouchsafed his younger readers a vision
of a grandiose Mediterranean architectural tradition.
An historian might object that they were in error in
interpreting the ‘Unite’ in the light of a book written
twenty years earlier, and yet that book offered a
phrase that seemed a veritable key to the majestic
and magisterial authority of Marseilles (and of all
other good architecture as well): “L’Architecture,
c’est, avec des matteres brutes etablir des rapports
6mouvants”. To construct moving relationships out
of brute materials was to be the central ambition of
Brutalism.
16
O
For illustrations see page 28-31
D
I
I
A
J
2.2 Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
Yet the first completed building to carry the title of
‘New Brutalist’ was not Corbusian; rather, it was the
most precise imitation of the building style of Mies
van der Rohe to have appeared outside the USA by
that time, and in view of importance accorded in
later developments to the presence of beton brut
and other naturally surfaced materials, this puri¬
tanical exercise in the assembly of highly finished
synthetic materials such as glass and steel, the
‘Technological’ materials, may seem a surprising be¬
ginning. Yet the morality that approved the raw con¬
crete of the ‘Unit<§’ could equally well approve the
use that Mies van der Rohe had made of steel, glass
and brick in the campus buildings for the Illinois In¬
stitute of Technology at Chicago.
In spite of what is commonly regarded as the ‘fine¬
drawn fastidiousness’ of Mies’s detailing, the hon¬
esty with which he handles steel for the solid mate¬
rial it is, can be compared with Le Corbusier’s
honesty in demythologising concrete and recog¬
nising it for what it is. In spite of the rhetoric about
steel that had been ringing in the ears of modern
architects from the time of the Futurists onwards,
very little of it had actually been made manifest to
the eye in Modern Architecture. Apart from glazing
bars, visible steol — and visible structural steel
above all - had been restricted to a few very spe¬
cialised settings like Chareau’s ‘Maison de Verre’
in Paris. Under normal circurustances, the steel¬
work lurked invisibly behind the fireproofing required
by local building ordinances.
By an astute and casuistical reading of the local
fire-regulations, Mies had been able to give an ex¬
posed frame to nearly all his structures on the NT
campus, and thus offer the outlines of a grammar of
visible steel framing. This grammar was, inevitably, as
refined as that of the ‘Unite’ was coarse. Further¬
more, where the ‘Unite’ had, perforce, to glory in its
technical imperfections, the buildings at I IT were
full of flourishes of precision-craftsmanship, espec¬
ially in the welding. However, it should be remem¬
bered that welding is as natural to this concept of
steelwork as is shuttering to concrete, and that fine
craftsmanship in welding is readily available in the
USA, where welding is as widely distributed a skill
as are peasant crafts in Europe. It is doubtful if this
aspect of NT was fully understood in Europe at the
time, because the welding does not register very
noticeably in the book and magazine illustrations
that were virtually the only source of information to
European architectural students, to whom currency
restrictions still made the USA as remote and in¬
accessible as the moon.
But they could still see that Mies had made an hon¬
est use of steel as a builders’ material, employing
it, not as an abstract ideal of structural stiffness, but
as a real substance having a surface, substance and
character of its own, and structural habits as reliable
and comprehensible as those of brick or masonry.
And the steel is not only made visible, but the man¬
ner of its assembly is made manifest, so that the out-
17
line grammar of it is filled out with detailed usages.
As Mark Hartland Thomas wrote in ’Architectural De¬
sign’ 8 (at that time the preferred magazine of the
younger generation) “Mies takes the elements in a
piece of building, and sets them together in a man¬
ner that is most characteristic of themselves, and in
these positions they make spaces and architecture”.
Hartland Thomas had seen the buildings for himself
and could appreciate the importance of their purely
material qualities even in the details, but very few
other contributors to the English architectural po¬
lemic had. Faced with usages such as Mies’s man¬
ner of turning the corners of the building with a
richly plastic incident, they did not see the structural
logic and material ingenuity of this detail. Instead
they saw a philosophical problem in abstract aes¬
thetics: did the failure of the two wall planes to meet
at the corner mean that Mies’s facades were to be
read as endless, indeterminate?
This question (meaningful, surely, only to those who
know the buildings through such abstract represen¬
tations as plans and photographs, but not in the
real?) was first raised by Richard Llewelyn-Davies
in a paper given at the Architectural Association 9 ,
and could only have been propounded in the histo¬
rically sophisticated mental atmosphere of English
architectural debate at the time, involving (as it
does) reference to Mondriaan’s concept of the rec¬
tangle as an impure form bounded by lines which
intersect but do not stop at the intersection. From
this proposition, Llewelyn-Davies, like Gerhard Kail-
man in an influential article on the impact of techno¬
logy which had appaearedi in a special issue of the
‘Architectural Review’ on America, went on to the
idea of an endless or indeterminate architecture, in
which units of accomodation could be added or sub¬
tracted without altering the aesthetic quality.
Though the Brutalists (and their even younger suc¬
cessors) have always been ready to flirt with this
idea, they scouted its application to Mies van der
Rohe, insisting on the regular symmetry of the com¬
position of the facades of the buildings at NT, and
their axial planning. They also - and this was wish¬
ful thinking - believed that Mies made conscious
use of the Golden Section in designing his build¬
ings. There has never been any convincing evidence
from the Mies office to support this proposition, it
was purely the transposition to one esteemed mas¬
ter, of the ‘Modulor’ mystique of the other. For the
Modulor was an extremely lively topic at the time.
In spite of the difficulties of using it in practice, it
seemed to stand for a principle of reliable mathe-
matica order against a sea of compromise and ar¬
chitectural irresponsibility, and it was easier to visu¬
alise such a proportional system against the back¬
ground of a seemingly flat and diagrammatic facade
of the type found at NT, than to bend and fold it to
fit the deeply modelled plasticity of the ‘Unite’. The
fusion of the Mies-image with the Corb-image was
an understandable, if philosophically reprehensible,
step towards the creation of the kind of single vi¬
sion of a real and convincing architecture that this
generation sought.
18
0 'Architectural Design’, July 1952
9 Llewelyn-Davies’ paper was reprinted in the ‘Journal of the
Architectural Association', November 1951, and Kallman's article
appeared in ‘Architectural Review' December 1950.
For illustrations j
L
4
i
^g>
page 32—40
3 Secondary School, Hunstanton
The first building completed in the world to be cal¬
led ‘New Brutalist’ by its architects, was the school
at Hunstanton in Norfolk. In chronological fact, it
had been designed even before Hans Asplund first
uttered the words ‘Neo-Brutalist’ since it was the
winning entry in a competition held in 1949. Not only
was the award of the first prize to architects as young
as the Smithsons then were, a remarkable eveni, but
that it should go to so extreme a design was equally
remarkable, since Denis Clarke-Hall, the assessor,
was no extremist himself, although he had been one
of the pioneers of modern school design in Britain.
But, by the time the school was completed in 1954,
the Smithsons had become avowed Brutalists, and
the term New Brutalism was rapidly gaining cur¬
rency outside Britain — a circumstance which clear¬
ly disturbed some of those who were prepared to
admire the school, but not the Brutalist programme
which had subsequently become attached to it. The
reason for the long delay between design and com¬
pletion was one of those spasmodic steel-shortages
of the post-war epoch which constantly interrupted
building-work, but whereas Le Corbusier had turned
such a crisis to advantage at the ‘Unite’ the Smith-
sons were too young and absolutist to consider
scrapping the deeply pondered work that had been
put into the steel-framed design for Hunstanton. It
would be visible steel or nothing.
While this insistence on visible steel gives a clear
indication of the stylistic affiliations of Hunstanton,
there are some striking and important differences
from the buildings at IIT, differences which were
largely, and understandably, overlooked at the time.
To begin with, there is no risk of the facades being
read as endless, in the Llewelyn-Davies sense. At
the expense of some of Mies van der Rohe’s intel¬
lectual clarity, the building makes neat and unargu¬
able corners, and the closed symmetry of the com¬
position of the main elevations of both the school
proper and its off-lying gymnasium is immediatly
striking to the eye. This is particularly so in the
gymnasium which, being a single volume, reveals
the more clearly its symmetry inside and out.
In the larger block housing the school proper, sym¬
metry persists, even if it is less obvious. The central
multi-purpose hall is placed across the shorter axis,
and is flanked by two open light-courts. The rest of
the accommodation - service rooms, heavy and dirty
areas, on the ground floor) classrooms on the floor
above - is disposed in a large rectangular loop em¬
bracing these three central voids. The main eleva¬
tions are expressed in terms of room-sized areas of
total glazing, or room-sized panels of blank white
brickwork, either for privacy or to act as wind-brac¬
ing for the structure. However, the symmetry of the
plan and of the elevational pattern, should not be
seen as major architectural objectives of the design,
however full the architects’ minds may have been of
Wittkowerian or Palladian ideas. The formal clarity,
like the insistence on almost total glazing of work¬
ing areas, is to be seen as part of a determination
to make the whole conception of the building plain
and comprehensible. No mystery, no romanticism,
no obscurities about function or circulation. In this,
it succeeded almost too well for a large section of
architectural opinion in England that had become
committed to empiricist romanticism — in spite of
its manifest importance in the development of Eng¬
lish architectural ideas (the ‘Architectural Review
called it ‘the most truly modern building in Britain’)
it does not form part of the collection of slides as¬
sembled by J M Richards for the use of official lec¬
turers sent abroad by the British Council.
But what caused even more profound shock, not only
to architectural romantics but to educational senti¬
mentalists as well, was the attitude of the architects
to the materials of which the school is constructed.
The basic framing is of partly prewelded steel fra¬
mes, calculated according to the Plastic Theory
(then an innovation in itself) for extreme economy.
The floors and roof-slabs are built up of pre-cast
concrete slabs, and these are left as exposed con¬
crete on the underside. Walls that are brick on the
outside are brick (the same bricks) on the inside,
fairfaced on both sides. Wherever one stands within
the school one sees its actual structural materials
exposed, without plaster and frequently without paint.
The electrical conduits, pipe-runs and other services
are exposed with equal frankness. This, indeed, is
an attempt to make architecture out of the relation¬
ships of brute materials, but it is done with the very
greatest self-denying restraint.
Nothing is done to ‘dramatise’ the services (as was
done in some of the open-ceilinged committee rooms
at the United Nations building, New York, for in¬
stance) and the standard metal sections of which the
frame and window-framing are assembled do not
repay intense study in the ways that those of Mies’s
work at IIT do. Whereas Mies builds up rich and
complex mouldings, the Smithsons assemble their
standard sections with a conspicuous understate¬
ment that makes it seem that it must have been they,
and not Mies, who had said “I don’t want to be inter¬
esting, I want to be good”.
In this, as in other aspects of the building, the
Smithsons might be said to be conforming to basic
patterns in English architectural psychology. In im¬
porting the Miesian style, and then appearing to of¬
fer to correct it (in some ways, Hunstanton is more
frank about its materials and structure than any¬
thing by Mies) they may be compared to Colin
Campbell offering to remove certain ‘irregularities
from the style of Pailadio at the beginning of the
Anglo-Palladian movement of the eighteenth cen¬
tury. But even more securely within engrained Eng¬
lish traditions is the insistence on a pure geometri¬
cal grid of horizontals and verticals, and an air of
suppressed extremism, of gentlemanly‘bloody-mind¬
edness’ imprisoned within the grid. Not long after
the building was completed, Nikolaus Pevsner gave
a series of radio talks on ‘The Englishness of Eng¬
lish Art’, in which he drew attention to this barely
suppressed geometrical extremism in both Gothic
and Renaissance architecture in England, and cited
19
Hardwick Hall (1590—1597) as a prime example of
this tendency. He did not go on to note that Hard¬
wick’s architect had the same name as Hunstanton’s
— though spelled Smythson — but other commenta¬
tors were not so slow off the mark.
Those who damned the Hunstanton School for mer¬
ely ‘importing a foreign style’ missed its intense Eng-
lishness. Those who damned — or praised — it for
its Brutalism were on more secure ground. Even so,
some influential critics doubted whether it was really
an example of The New Brutalism. Thus Philip John¬
son, who probably knew the Smithsons and their
background as well as anyone on the international
scene, observed in the ‘Architectural Review’ at the
end of a glowing critique of Hunstanton: 10
Now that the Smithsons have turned against such
formalistic and ‘composed’ designs toward an Adolf
Loos type of Anti-Design which they call the New
Brutalism (a phrase which is already being picked
up by the Smithsons’ contemporaries to defend
atrocities)...”
while the ‘Review’ added in a footnote:
The architects themselves would certainly disagree
with Mr Johnson’s separation of Hunstanton from
the New Brutalist canon, even though the term had
not been coined when the school was designed.”
"7 * , 7 1I,on was becoming confused by the many
things that happened to the Smithsons, to architec-
]Zr u u and ‘ he WOr,d - and the *ord Brutalist
■tself, which was being heavily overworked already
" 'Architectural Review’, September 1954
20
\
13
General view of the site
14
Sections and plans of basic apartment type (scale 1:200)
2 entrance
3 living room and kitchen
4 parents’ bedroom and bathroom
5 cupboards and showor lor children
0 children's room
7 void over living room
23
I ~
External balcony of an apartment
16 (right)
Close up Of balconies and brise-soleil
24
ice area
# m
u n 1
Iff
Hr
•/
1
• ^BK
R
■T'
i H fcl 'i¥' i wHWi 1 ■** — „. !■ ^^\i mm "‘ *^SHHJU
y
i
10/19
!gpH^"
■ ^— := :
SW*-
=1
LiH
Rditips diid play-areas on roof
20
Detail of pilotis
*i BH
4B ^n*T f ?~fa^"""SSMB—t IT *
C\^\ _ m —
21-26
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Chicago (Illinois, USA), Alumni
Memorial Hall (Illinois Institute of Technology). 1945—47
21
Entrance side
22
Ground floor plan
28
lifer
*
27-42
Alison and Peter Smithson; Hunstanton (England),
Secondary School. 1949-54
27
Block plan
a gymnasium
b caretaker’s garden
c school garden
d garden courts
c main teaching-block
f wall
g games field
h water-tower
i bicycle sheds
j forecourt
k/l kitchen and chimney stack
m house-craft room
n workshops
o embankment
p car parking
28
Interior of the central hall
29/30
Exterior views
1
Water-tower and service rooms
entrance
1
Hr
—_
33
Ground floor plan (scale 1:500)
1 conservatory
2 boys’ cloakrooms
3 boys’ lavatories
4 girls’ cloakrooms
5 girls’ lavatories
6 drying room
7 theatrical store
8 south exit
9 covered wing
10 chair-store
11 caretaker
12 garden crafts
13 gardener
14/15 staff lavatories
16 staff room
17 assistant head teacher
18 head teacher
19 secretary’s store
20 secretary’s cubicle
21 green room area
22 dining area
23 warden
24 waiting room
25 store
26/27 medical suite
28—32 house-craft suite
33 bicycle sheds
34 water-tower
35 metal workshop
36 carpentry workshop
37 servery
38 wash-up room
39 main kitchen
40 vegetable room
41 dry food store
42 larder
43 kitchen supervisor
44 -t'dult house-crafts
45 nain hall
\
v
\
34
Upper floor plan (scale 1:500)
1 library
2 book store
3 cleaners
4 classrooms
7 crafts room
8 house-crafts
9 art room
10 projection room
11 supply room
12 upper part of hall
5 preparation room
Gymnasium, ground floor plan (scale 1
47 instructor’s room
48 general store
49 games kit store
50 gymnasium space
36
Gymnasium, upper floor plan (scale 1:500)
13 changing rooms
14 upper part of gymnasium space
15 showers
37
.
42
^ iew into garden court
41
Washbasins in cloakroom
For illustrations see page 42-53
J
4.1 Progress to a-formalism
As bas been said, H— *££££.
published in a siUiation 'n ^, ^ h>d
Brutalism were already . things said and
ed some depthi of mean '^ widely recognised con¬
done, over and above he hrase s tiU ‘belonged’
nection with ‘beton brut _ h P ^ ^ thejr activities
to the SmithsonSi f 10 ^ 6 ’ giving distinctive quali-
above all others a Outstanding among
ties to the concept of Bn^^n 'Parallel of Life
‘^thr^ competition projects, none
of which had proved successfu^ chosen after
‘Parallel of Life an ono f so me hundred photo-
much debate for an exhibd d . p ig53 by the
graphic images which = photographer
S3.»"• in cdl^»J3, Edouardo Pao-
Nigel Henderson and toes v exhibition m a
13. More »£££« «»'
later chapter, s,nce *L en The New Brutalism and
of the connections b m the other arts. Suffice it
analogous manifestation^ ^ almost exclusively in
to say here that Pa t hroDology and technology
Images drawn from ^hropol^ ^ ^ art galle
and that, as ob ) ect ® temporary Arts) they were a
(The Institute of Co P f conV entional ideas
deliberate flouting, "<* ' concept of a
of ‘beauty’, but also of the^^ of violence
■good photograph • Ma y ^ anti . aes thetic views of
and destruction, d.sto * & coarse gra iny texture
the human figure. • by the collaborators a
which was clearly regarded ^ coarse textures
one of their mam v "% uper ficial cri, tics to relate
were, obviously, easy P brick surfaces m Huns-
to the exposed concre that th e other quah-
tanton, and 8 JJ, an intentional part o
ties of the exhibition ^ ^ damned as
Hunstanton’s archi in the sense of sub
antihuman, -^'"^tov-liaa 'parti-pris' can be
human. Although a ons , aught on the Smithsons,
detected in much of th crit icism in arch.tec-
the collapse of Ang ^ c)eared th e vision of
ture has not in eve y damn ed out . 0 f-hand
critics, and Hunstanton those who have ne ver
• m these terms critical objections were
seen it). Furthermore, Smithson schemes,
projected forward onto Respectively on to
however ^signs about to be discus-
the three competition
xnt;
Coventry Crf-W * 533
was won b, Sir Baad SP>n
version of a traditional 9 P submitted
number o, "t ^ic.l iand.ncy, though
designs of a much submm6d by the Smith-
I few were as radical a a vas t square space
sons. Basically, h ed ‘anticlastic’ roof, sup-
covered by a sadd Within this space
_^ „♦ two opposite corners, vv
hardlv be called a centralised plan, its intense for-
man Reveals th. direct influence of Wittkoweds
Pal I ad i an studies, and the use of a simplified geo-
me deal grid to dispose the parts suggests a so a
Ttudy of Le Corbusier’s ‘Traces regulators . Al¬
though no direct influence from European liturgical
had some’considerable influence °n the entries sub-
Olic CathedS' Lithsons was concerned, the im-
S-atrfflsx
direction at this early date (1951) was to cost them
the support of that faction whose repW to the^^ ^
« o mntributor to a discussion on
SSwrssMsa-
New Brutalism. +hp lack of rigour
u represented a revolt again ... f ,.
a nlpar thinking, the romantic pasticheries
f-=SEt?2rH=
SSSsS
W ! h ° le f " iu p Smithsons were from regarding Beaux-
Arts classicism as the only antidote to
and clear thinking, was to become clear - for those
who cared to look - in their next two major p
Golden Lane housing development for the city of
London was put out to competition in 1952, and was
won by Chamberlin Powell and Bon. It "as the first
major competition for a housing scheme for some
years and attracted a great number of entries, of
considerable variety both in
ral method - there was even one strict Zhd
exercise in ‘People’s Detailing’. The winning design
was a fairly routine exercise in Mainstream Modern¬
ism with the usual mixture of high and low blocks,
aTheT elegantly styled in a formalistic manner, but
he Smithsons and some of the other younger en¬
trants again revealed a much more radical approach.
" It Will be observed the Fo ' m ®[ f(j h r “ a( , T ,^ mean ings to be
in this argument: ‘Informa an ’ f (h preS ent argu-
allocated to the three words m the context of _ ,1^, sym .
ment can be crudely distingmshe other very explicit
metrically composed, or ordered oy
abstract geometrical discipline; visual
-informal', asymmetrical and subject to some
discioline (such as Picturesque compos,t
41
V
The radicalism lies in an attempt to see what they
were designing as a complete environment for hu¬
man beings, not just the provision of a certain num¬
ber of bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens and so forth,
packaged into an acceptable architectural composi¬
tion. An awakening interest in the real life of the
cities, something of an ecologist’s approach to urban
man (though they were not yet using the word
‘habitat’) influenced by the work of sociologists like
Wilmot and Young, was eventually to become one
of the mainstays of Brutalist planning theory, but at
Golden Lane it is still subservient to the manifest
influence of Le Corbusier and the ‘Unite’ at Marseil"
les. This appears clearly enough in the roof-struc¬
tures of the Smithson project, but what is equally
noticeable is the attempt to ‘rectify’ the errors of
the older master. The ‘rue interieure’ - that dark
corridor without natural lighting — was always the
weakest point of the ‘Unite’ section, and at Golden
Lane the Smithsons moved it to the exterior of the
lock, enlarged it to a sizable pedestrian walk twelve
eet wide, and denominated it ‘street deck’. This
concept was not the Smithson’s private property -
't appears in one or two student projects of the time
(possibly under Smithson influence) including anoth¬
er entry for Golden Lane, which was to be, in the
en j of greater consequence than the Smithson
en , ry ‘ Was sch eme submitted by Jack Lynn
and Ivor Smith which, though equally unsuccessful
a olden Lane, was instrumental in their app 0 '"*'
me "* *° the s taff of the City Architect in Sheffield,
a ? ? ,*° des '9 n and construction of the larg® s
treet-deck building completed to date at Park Hill-
^ertcun philosophical, psychological and architectural
ns equen ces 0 f the street deck concept need to
sn e ^ ere: the deck was intended to function
str^ y u an L d ps y chol °gically in the manner of the
thp m W IC * n wor ^' n 9 class areas in Britain — |S
tinnai ai ? f° rum °f communication, the tra 1
p,ay f°und for children, and the only publ-c
sociahT*^ * or mass meetings and large-sca e
innlv y f Was *° ^ u ^'l these functions convinc
and h t Street deck would hav e to be continuous
necp<f aC f Very part of the development — if it was
would Sar T t0 down to ground level at any point i
~ UCe th * deck, psychologically, to the status
waq y .° f a < ? orr,dor inside a building. This continuity
x- gained by putting the whole of the accommoda-
extensions to Sheffield University were the sub
of a competition (won by a routine moderr
s-box style entry from Gollins Melvin Ward anc
42
Partners) which also attracted a number of very ex¬
treme entries from younger architects, including a
compact and sophisticated variation on Corbusian
themes by James Stirling and a project by the
Smithsons that seemed to be a deliberate affront to
everything that was commonly regarded as archi¬
tecture. At first sight the grouping of the blocks of
accommodation is as loose and unrigorous as any
Picturesque composition by the Brutalists’ despised
elders, but whereas Picturesque compositional tech¬
niques were normally used to build up images of
rich and confusing abundance, the effect of the ar¬
rangement offered by the Smithsons appears in the
drawing to be aloof, rebarbative and deliberately
anti-graceful, replacing the sweetness and senti¬
mentality of the Picturesque with a blunt and un¬
compromising statement of structure and function in
every part. Above all, it made a plain statement of
the facts of circulation at ground level, on elevated
street-decks, or on pedestrian bridges spanning be¬
tween one building and the next (usually in conjunc¬
tion with duct-bridges for service-runs, thus empha¬
sising that human beings are not the only bodies that
circulate). Because of this flourishing display of the
. circulation system, the unifying principle of the de¬
sign — in the absence of any comprehensible visual
aesthetic, - becomes the connectivity of the circula¬
tion. Hence the use of the term ‘topological’ to
characterise the design, a term not applied by the
Smithsons themselves, though Smithson himself
admitted more than once at this period that he found
topological considerations of this sort a growing
preoccupation in his larger designs.
The extremism of this Sheffield project was widely
felt at the time — it has no conceivable precedent,
except that the relationship of structure to glazing
may have been remotely suggested by the one of the
works of that great British anti-aesthete — Sir Owen
Williams — the‘Dry’ manufacturing block (but not the
well-known ‘Wet’ factory alongside) of the Boots
chemical plant at Beeston, Nottinghamshire. For the
Smithsons, the anti-formalism of Sheffield was also
an extreme point; nothing later from their drawing
board has quite the same ‘je-m’en-foutiste’ quality,
as if they had completed some private voyage of
exploration into the anti-architectural and were now
turning back. Nevertheless, the extremism of the
gesture was profoundly appreciated by the more
dissatisfied members of the generation of students
who were beginning to look to the Brutalists for
leadership, and there ensued a tradition of wild
visionary town-planning projects, cast in this topolo¬
gical mode, and even one or two major building de¬
signs, such as the Fun Palace project of Cedric
Price 13 , one of the most complete ‘anti’-buildings
ever projected in Europe. But this was not the di-
43 rection in which the New Brutalism as an interna-
Alison and Peter Smithson, tional movement was now headed. That direction
Edouardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson; was obscurely suggested by the first building OUt-
London (England^, Exhibition Parallel of side g r j^ a j n 0 f w hl c h anyone felt required to ask ‘Is
Three views of the version at the institute »t Brutalist?’ - Louis Kahn’s art-gallery building for
Of Contemporary Arts Yale University.
13 The 'Fun Palace', promoted by the left-wing impresario and
theatrical producer, Joan Littlewood, is essentially a project for
a gigantic machine fulfilling the functions of a number of build¬
ing types in the realm of entertainment and community activities.
Operationally it consists of a system of cranes, which can draw
from stock a variety of components (mechanical, structural, en¬
vironmental) from which are assembled covered or open spaces
for all types of spectacles, sports, artistic and recreational acti¬
vities. These structures are then dismantled when the ground-
space is required for other spaces for other activities, and new
ones are built, on a day-to-day basis. There are thus no perma¬
nent architectural spaces inside, and no permanent architectural
volumes inside, the structure for the gantry cranes and mechani¬
cal services being the only constant element.
43
For illustrations see page 54-55
4.2 Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
The introduction of the Yale Art Gallery into the Bru-
tahst canon was first suggested by Ian McCallum
(then executive editor of the ‘Architectural Review’)
rW 5 ’ bUt '* Kad a ' ready Caught the e ve of
the Brutal,st connection in England. Not only did it
appear to share their preoccupations and interests
but it also marked a clear break with existing US
trad ltl ons m Modern Architecture, whether native
and romantic, or imported and rationalistic. In this
circumstance, it is not surprising that it should be
LTh\" ays ' 081 “ tenlali « »HtmtaJ :
though ,t ,s suprising enough that a work by a man
twenty years older than the Smithsons should be so
1 'Th Hunstanton it has a formal and axfal
P a . ( . rat ^ er . more s °Phisticated in its planninq tool
and its basic aesthetic leans heavily on the frank
expression of structure and materials Thirl k
concrete space-frame floor tetra hedral
tween fairly widely™ .! cone 1, ' T Spannln 9 b "
the English Brutalists of the Hunstanto^hasMlTj^
is a sense of appeal to basic architectural ndn^i
even to academic principles (as in the sequent
regular geometrical forms speared ™ tu f
axis) and there is also an air of deliberated 6 ^!!
for customary good architectural manners
'ally ln the way the whole block turns its harU P fu'
public street with a blank brick wa t h! t ^
nothing about the interior except lh ,
The whole build ng has a Dowerf .,1 <• ? s ‘
but it is an image 9
memory after one has left the buildinn u b 6S fr ° m
actual presence is both mysterious 9 ’ ' tS
Perhaps ’irresolute' mighTbJ 7Zn ld ™ Uddlad -
‘muddled’ for some aspects of the desian'F
stance, the glazing of the courtyard wall 4 n ° P m "
below the quality and inventiveness of 8 WS
the building. It is a functionally adequate anYhol ,°I
solution to the problem, but its hol*r l
in its tranh admission oi Kah^ ^
express”^ 0 the° Tt'iml S' 9 '“ S ' Tte
the fact that, for reasons ot il
7 <*“'■*»» .PParenTtSSe 9 :?;:
floor structure became, as built a svstom t u
beams instead. ’ SyStem of braca d
But this nicety of structural mathematics rtr.
alter the visual fact that these structures ann 6S " 0t
space-frames to the eye, and when a floor is
ed of screens and clutter, as durino the n
of an exhibition, they are impressive bo
.ecturai artefact, and as a me, S' 7“-
and scale to the spaces they cover. ThZh 1
design is everywhere less lucid than at h t 9h h ®
its mysteries contribute to its qualitv ^ nstanton >
tectural experience. The concealmelt o fZ Z
withm an almost unpierced drum of concrete heiotf 8
“ g s ^
triangle between one floor
tween sheer walls of concrete, unmodulated by
anything beyond the vertically planked shutter-pat¬
tern of the concrete, the impress of the fixing studs
that held the shuttering together, and the horizontal
joint at each floor-level, marking the height of one
lift of the shuttering. It is a classic demonstration of
absolute Brutalist truth to a particular method of
construction, and has the added historical impor¬
tance of being the most extended demonstration to
d ate, by anyone other than Le Corbusier, of the
aesthetics of ‘b<§ton brut’.
But the fact remains that this, the high point of
Kahn’s architectural achievement at that time, is
conducted in secret, so to speak, and contributes
nothing to the visual image of the rest of the build¬
ing. n a somewhat similar manner, the axial parti of
. Plan remains a ‘secret’. On the street elevation
c °ncealed, on the courtyard side it is
x , 6 j as y mme trical central panel of the
art a ?\\ ^ the n0rmal use of the building as an
tributes 6 !^! e , exact ec l ui Partition of the plan con-
visual p P 0 ,ts factional organisation or the
visual expenence of the visitor.
goodlS 6 " 8 may make Kahn ’ s Ya,e Art Ga,lery a
the prespn+ n 9 +° l ' a k ad one » but this is not the point at
cern is thi** •* ^ ° f . the argument. What is of con-
to the arm * a fbat is so deviously devoted
be assimilated'to 68 ° f aCademic classicism could
that now in !? Y * c °ncept of The New Brutalism
the Sheffield 6 6 •*^ at ant '' aca demic a-formality of
mean? The w ^ at c °uld the concept now
tributed the e| mi S ° ns ’ conve niently enough, con-
1955 issue of.. em ul ntS ° f an answe r to the January
Architectural Design’.
44
4.3 Manifesto
For illustrations see page 56-60, 78-79
The Smithsons had been contributing statements
and letters on The New Brutalism to the English
architectural magazines ever since the publication
of their projected house in Soho, and continued to
do so well into 1956. Although these miscellaneous
literary activities had contributed some resounding
rhetorical phrases - “We live on moron-made cit¬
ies!” etc — to the discussion, there had been no
extended statement of aims and orientation until the
effects of a change in the editorial staff of 'Archi¬
tectural Design’ began to take full effect in 1954.
During the course of the previous year Theo Crosby,
who had been associated with the Smithsons and
friends of theirs, such as Edouardo Paolozzi, joined
the staff of ‘Architectural Design’, and was able to
swing the magazine’s policy toward the interests of
the younger generation, with a conscious appeal to
student opinion. The Brutalist/Palladian wing of opin¬
ion benefited in the creation of a publishing outlet
for their views, and none profited better than the
Smithsons.
The first major manifestation was in August 1954,
when Peter Smithson contributed a study of recent
architecture in Holland. In view of his predilections,
it is not surprising that van den Broek and Bakema
emerged as the heroes of this piece, with illustra¬
tions of van den Broek’s house and the Lijnbaan
scheme. But equally conspicuous is the fact that
Smithson was far more familiar with the history of
Modern Architecture than were the more senior mem¬
bers of the profession who had previously contributed
to the magazine. Not only is Mondriaan discussed
(familiar to British architects in this connection be¬
cause of his sojourn in London) but also less well-
publicised figures such as van Doesburg and Kurt
Schwitters (the latter’s stay in Britain had left him as
unknown as when he arrived) and, above all, Gerrit
Thomas Rietveld is given an importance strikingly at
variance with the general opinion of him in the bulk
of architectural writing at the time. There were
specific local and contemporary reasons for this:
Rietveld was cast in the role of the guiding father-
figure so painfully absent from the British scene.
”... Rietveld created the incomparable house at
Utrecht 1923-24 - the only truly canonical modern
building in Europe. Holland has therefore a living
great master.”
Smithson here spoke for all the young architects in
Britain, left leaderless by the failure of nerve of an
elder generation psychologically more separated
from them than was the case in any continental
country where invasion and occupation had created
more obvious rifts between generations. Almost un¬
intentionally, the Brutalists had to fill this vacuum
of leadership, and assume the role of guides and
mentors that was almost thrust upon them by stu¬
dents, who could write 14 :
“For myself, and nearly all the young architects I
meet, ‘New Brutalism 1 stands for an architectural
14 Letter from William Cowburn in ‘Architectural Design’,
June 1957
ideal which is very acceptable: we would have to
say these things (ourselves) if the Smithsons did
not do so ...”
But the Smithsons would have to say a good deal
more than the things that were contained in the
statement of January 1955 before they could fulfil
the role of leaders. Like all their public statements
it represents almost exclusively their personal pre¬
occupations at the moment of putting pen to paper,
and was virtually incapable of standing by itself with¬
out gloss or explanation, and in this case a pre¬
amble was provided (apparently by Crosby himself)
which attempted to fix an historical context that
would establish the relevance of their views. The
complete document reads as follows.
The New Brutalism
“In 1954 a new and long overdue explosion took
place in architectural theory. For many years since
the war we have continued in our habit of debasing
the coinage of M Le Corbusier, and had created a
style — ‘Contemporary’ — easily recognisable by its
misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of
‘modern’ details, frames, recessed plinths, decora¬
tive piloti (sic). The reaction appeared at last in
the shape of Hunstanton School (by Alison and Pe¬
ter Smithson) an illustration of the ‘New Brutalism’.
The name is new: the method, a revaluation of
those advanced buildings of the twenties and thirt¬
ies whose lessons (because of a few plaster-cracks)
have been forgotten. As well as this, there are
certain lessons of the formal use of proportion (from
Professor Wittkower) and a respect forthe sensuous
use of each material (from the Japanese). Naturally,
a theory which takes the props from the generally
accepted and easily produced ‘Contemporary’ has
generated a lot of opposition. All over the country
we have been asked to explain the new message.
In the hope of provoking as many readers as pos¬
sible to think more deeply about the form and pur¬
pose of their art, we asked the Smithsons, as pro¬
phets of the movement, to supply a definition or
statement which, somethat edited, appears below.”
“Our belief that the New Brutalism is the only pos¬
sible development forth is moment from the Mo¬
dern Movement, stems not only from the knowledge
that Le Corbusier is one of its practitioners (start¬
ing with the ‘beton brut’ of the Unite) but because
fundamentally both movements have used as their
^yardstick Japanese architecture, its underlying idea,
principles and spirit.
Japanese architecture seduced the generation span¬
ning 1900, producing, in Frank Lloyd Wright, the
open plan and an odd sort of constructed decora¬
tion; in Le Corbusier the purist aesthetic — the slid¬
ing screens, continuous space, the power of white
and earth-colours; in Mies, the structure and screens
as absolutes. Through Japanese architecture the
longings of the generation of Gamier and Behrens
found FORM.
But, for the Japanese, their FORM was only part of
a general conception of Life, a sort of reverence
for the natural world and, from that, for the materials
of the built world.
45
4.2 Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
For illustrations see page 54-55
The introduction of the Yale Art Gallery intothe Bru-
tahst canon was first suggested by Ian McCallum
(then executive editor of the ‘Architectural Review’)
tte Brut I 95 ?’ bUt '* Had a ' ready Caught the eye of
the Brutalist connection in England. Not only did it
a p pear to share their preoccupations and interests
ut it also marked a clear break with existinq US
traditions in Modern Architecture whether / r S
and romantic, or imported and ,7H ' X
circumstance, it is not suqarising that it should hi
;L7i.7:ip a :s rst; r;„rr “ :
expression of structure and material/-™, th fra " k
a radical structural innovation t mat'Ju ' S ® Ven
use of Plastic Theorv in th- tc ^ ^ unstan ton’s
concrete space-frame floor-shuctmea'sD* 6 *’^ 6 ’!’ 3 ’
tween fairly widely set concrete 9 be ‘
the English Brutalists of the Hunstantn mn h S ' With
is a sense of appeal to basic architectural D aSe ’. th . ere
even to academic principles (as in the pnnc 'P les .
regular geometrical forms speared° f
axis) and there is also an air of deliberate dis^ 0 ^!!
for customary good architectural manners 9
ially in the way the whole block turns itsh \ eS9ec '
public street with a blank brick wa tSat °" ^
nothing about the interior exceot the ! , reveals
The whole building has
but ^ i® an image that the mind asTembl
memory after one has left the buildinq be ° m
actual presence is both mysterious 9 ’ j Use its
Perhaps ’irresolute’ might be a bette nd t mUddled-
‘muddled’ for some aspects of the / - term than
stance, the g,aping of 5,. co7a rt “,7 7
below the quality and inventiveness 0 f V* * T"
the building. It is a functionally adeouat Vu^ ° f
solution to the problem but its u 9 ate and honest
in its frartk admLion oi K.hS 77
a better way of covering this facade with da's “’7
expression of the structural svsfpm • th 9 f The
the fact that, fo, reasons 7^ '^ H-
ing calculations the apparent SD ! ro 9 1 eengmeer -
Jeer structure became, ."a built .'“,,'17! “»
beams instead. ’ ystem of braced
But this nicety of structural mathematics ^
alter the visual fact that these stmetur/s a 068 " 0t
space-frames to the eye, and when a fl PP ® ar 3S
ed of screens and clutter, as durinq the '® C '® ar '
of an exhibition, they are impressive boET 93 ^ 0 "
tectural artefacts and as a means of**-** ardli '
and scale to the spaces they cove Th '" 9
design ,s everywhere less lucid than at HunT ^
within an almost „„p ierMd drumoTcmcmte'he^
ens one’s awareness of tho „ terete, height-
ing the stairs, three Lor, 77"“
triangle between „„e flop, a„ d 9 , he n"™damg"!.*
tween sheer walls of concrete, unmodulated by
anything beyond the vertically planked shutter-pat¬
tern of the concrete, the impress of the fixing studs
that held the shuttering together, and the horizontal
joint at each floor-level, marking the height of one
lift of the shuttering. It is a classic demonstration of
absolute Brutalist truth to a particular method of
construction, and has the added historical impor¬
tance of being the most extended demonstration to
da te, by anyone other than Le Corbusier, of the
aesthetics of ‘b 6 ton brut’.
But the fact remains that this, the high point of
a n s architectural achievement at that time, is
oon ucted in secret, so to speak, and contributes
oo ing to the visual image of the rest of the build¬
ing. n a somewhat similar manner, the axial parti of
ne plan remains a ‘secret’. On the street elevation
concealed, on the courtyard side it is
fac d 6 ^ ,^ e as y mm ctrical central panel of the
art a d! ^ !" the normal use of the building as an
trihutoo ei rli!^ e GXact e quipartition of the plan con-
visual * 6 *° functional organisation or the
Thes exper,ence ° f the visitor.
good e buiM ters may make Kahn ’ s Ya,e Art G a,,er y a
the prespn+ n9 ^ 0ra one » but this is not the point at
cern is this! if IV argument - what is of con :
to the nro * ^ Ulld| ng that is so deviously devoted
be a ssimi. a ?;? ,eS ° f academic classicism could
that now inclVV ° 0nCept of The New Brutalism
the Sheffi e |d U 6 • anb -academic a-formality of
mean? The W ^ at cou * d tb e concept now
tributed the el™ S ° ns ’ conv ®niently enough, con-
1 955 issue of‘A em u e ? tS an answer to the January
Architectural Design’.
44
For illustrations see page 56-60, 78-79
\
4.3 Manifesto
The Smithsons had been contributing statements
and letters on The New Brutalism to the English
architectural magazines ever since the publication
of their projected house in Soho, and continued to
do so well into 1956. Although these miscellaneous
literary activities had contributed some resounding
rhetorical phrases - “We live on moron-made cit¬
ies!” etc — to the discussion, there had been no
extended statement of aims and orientation until the
effects of a change in the editorial staff of ‘Archi¬
tectural Design’ began to take full effect in 1954.
During the course of the previous year Theo Crosby,
who had been associated with the Smithsons and
friends of theirs, such as Edouardo Paolozzi, joined
the staff of ‘Architectural Design’, and was able to
swing the magazine’s policy toward the interests of
the younger generation, with a conscious appea o
student opinion. The Brutalist/Palladian wing of opin¬
ion benefited in the creation of a publishing outlet
for their views, and none profited better than the
Smithsons. . .
The first major manifestation was ,n August 1954
when Peter Smithson contributed a study of recent
architecture in Holland. In view of his predilections,
it is not surprising that van den Broek and Bakema
emerged as the heroes of this piece, with illustra¬
tions of van den Broek’s house and the Lijnbaan
scheme. But equally conspicuous is the fact that
Smithson was far more familiar with the history of
Modern Architecture than were the more senior mem¬
bers of the profession who had previously contributed
to the magazine. Not only is Mondriaan discussed
(familiar to British architects in this connection be¬
cause of his sojourn in London) but also less well-
publicised figures such as van Doesburg and Kurt
Schwitters (the latter’s stay in Britain had left him as
unknown as when he arrived) and, above all. Gem
Thomas Rietveld is given an importance strikingly at
variance with the general opinion of him in the bulk
of architectural writing at the time. There were
specific local and contemporary reasons for this:
Rietveld was cast in the role of the guiding father-
figure so painfully absent from the British scene.
« Rietveld created the incomparable house at
I Itrprht 1923-24 - the only truly canonical modern
building in Europe. Holland has therefore a living
great master.” ... . .
Smithson here spoke for all the young architects in
Britain left leaderless by the failure of nerve of an
elder generation psychologically more separated
from them than was the case in any continental-
country where invasion and occupation had created
more obvious rifts between generations. Almost un¬
intentionally, the Brutalists had to fill this vacuum
of leadership, and assume the role of guides and
mentors that was almost thrust upon them by stu¬
dents, who could write ,4 :
“For myself, and nearly all the young architects I
meet, ’New Brutalism’ stands for an architectural
>* Letter from William Cowburn in 'Architectural Design’,
June 1957
ideal which is very acceptable: we would have to
say these things (ourselves) if the Smithsons did
not do so ...”
But the Smithsons would have to say a good deal
more than the things that were contained in the
statement of January 1955 before they could fulfil
the role of leaders. Like all their public statements
it represents almost exclusively their personal pre¬
occupations at the moment of putting pen to paper,
and was virtually incapable of standing by itself with¬
out gloss or explanation, and in this case a pre¬
amble was provided (apparently by Crosby himself)
which attempted to fix an historical context that
would establish the relevance of their views. The
complete document reads as follows.
The New Brutalism
“In 1954 a new and long overdue explosion took
place in architectural theory. For many years since
the war we have continued in our habit of debasing
the coinage of M Le Corbusier, and had created a
style — ‘Contemporary’ — easily recognisable by its
misuse of traditional materials and its veneer of
‘modern’ details, frames, recessed plinths, decora¬
tive piloti (sic). The reaction appeared at last in
the shape of Hunstanton School (by Alison and Pe¬
ter Smithson) an illustration of the ‘New Brutalism’.
The name is new: the method, a revaluation of
those advanced buildings of the twenties and thirt¬
ies whose lessons (because of a few plaster-cracks)
have been forgotten. As well as this, there are
certain lessons of the formal use of proportion (from
Professor Wittkower) and a respect forthe sensuous
use of each material (from the Japanese). Naturally,
a theory which takes the props from the generally
accepted and easily produced ‘Contemporary’ has
generated a lot of opposition. All over the country
we have been asked to explain the new message.
In the hope of provoking as many readers as pos¬
sible to think more deeply about the form and pur¬
pose of their art, we asked the Smithsons, as pro¬
phets of the movement, to supply a definition or
statement which, somethat edited, appears below.”
“Our belief that the New Brutalism is the only pos¬
sible development forth is moment from the Mo¬
dern Movement, stems not only from the knowledge
that Le Corbusier is one of its practitioners (start¬
ing with the ‘beton brut’ of the Unite) but because
fundamentally both movements have used as their
^yardstick Japanese architecture, its underlying idea,
principles and spirit.
Japanese architecture seduced the generation span¬
ning 1900, producing, in Frank Lloyd Wright, the
open plan and an odd sort of constructed decora¬
tion; in Le Corbusier the purist aesthetic — the slid¬
ing screens, continuous space, the power of white
and earth-colours; in Mies, the structure and screens
as absolutes. Through Japanese architecture the
longings of the generation of Gamier and Behrens
found FORM.
But, for the Japanese, their FORM was only part of
a general conception of Life, a sort of reverence
for the natural world and, from that, for the materials
of the built world.
45
It is this reverence for materials — a realisation of
the affinity which can be established between build¬
ings and man — which is at the root of the so-called
'New Brutalism.
It has been mooted that the Hunstanton School,
which probably owes as much to the existence of
Japanese architecture as to Mies, is the first realisa¬
tion of the New Brutalism in England.
This particular handling of materials, not in the craft
sense of Frank Lloyd Wright, but in intellectual
appraisal, has been ever present in the Modern
Movement, as, indeed, familiars of the early Ger¬
man architects have been prompt to remind us.
What is new about the New Brutalism among mo¬
vements is that it finds its closest affinities, not in
past architectural style, but in peasant dwelling
forms. It has nothing to do with craft. We see archi¬
tecture as the direct result of a way of life.
1954 has been a key year. It has seen American
advertising rival Dada in its impact of overlaid im-
agery; that automotive masterpiece the Cadillac
convertible, parallel-with-the-ground (four eleva¬
tions) classic box on wheels; the start of a new way
of thinking by CIAM; the revaluation of the work
of Gropius; the repainting of the villa at Garches?’
-- Knowingness or me pica.-- -
which can stand as a potted intellectual biography
of the Crosby age group but is already out of date
as far as the Brutalists’ attitude to classical propor¬
tion was concerned. Already at the time of ‘Parallel
of Life and Art’ Peter Smithson had said “We are
no going to talk about proportion and symmetry ,
and it will be noted that neither topic is mentioned
in the statements above. It was also a regrettable—
but probably inevitable - irony of architectural his-
tory that many Brutalist usages should become part
of the repertoire of cliches that kept ‘Contemporary’
a ive as a style’, and within three or four years of
this preamble being written.
In the Smithsons’ statements it is the references to
Japan and peasant building that are the most con¬
fusing and/or misleading. Neither of them had been
.? + a ^ a » n and the architecture is not
that of Mayekawa/Tange school, largely as that was
to feature in the later history of Brutalism. The
Smithsons’ Japan was the Japan of Bruno Taut’s
book on Japanese houses (Houses and People of
Japan Tokyo, 1937) and illustrations of the Katsura
etached palace (A revealing footnote to the Smith-
sons third paragraph reads “The Japanese film ‘Gate
of Hell showed houses, a monastery and palace, in
colour for the first time.”) and serves to illustrate the
sense of the sudden discovery of a whole culture
capaUe of carrying, as naturally as clothes, a tra¬
ditional architecture whose spatial sophistication
seemed light-years beyond the capacity of the West.
Something similar applies to the references to
‘peasant dwelling forms’. The search for Wittkowe-
rian architecture in Italy, and for the ‘Unite’, had
been part of a general rediscovery of the Mediter¬
ranean basin by that generation. Through eyes tu-
46
46
Kyoto (Japan), the Katsura detached pa-
^ce. Seventeenth century
External gallery at the North-East corner
47
Diagram of mat-planning and sliding
screens used in traditional Japanese
houses
tored by Le Corbusier’s sketches (and, doubtless,
by the art of Cezanne and Picasso) they saw, in
Mediterranean peasant buildings, an anonymous
architecture of simple, rugged geometrical forms,
smooth-walled and small-windowed, unaffectedly
and immemorially at home in its landscape setting.
Discovering similar or analogous qualities in, say, crof¬
ters’houses in Scotland orfarms in Gotland, they trans¬
lated this vision of a ‘Basic’ architecture into a ser¬
ies of rural housing projects prepared for CIAM-X
in Dubrovnik. They measured against these stand¬
ards Aalto’s work at Saynatsalo and Quaroni’s at
La Martella, and finally translated them into built
fact, not through the agency of the Smithsons, but
of Richard Llewelyn-Davies and John Weeks in the
village rebuilding at Rushbrooke, Suffolk. The archi¬
tects of this scheme have since become anathema
with the former Brutalist connection, but at the time
the Rushbrooke housing fascinated and provoked
them into a lengthy (and largely approving) corre¬
spondence in the ‘Architects’ Journal’.
The insistence in the Smithsons’ statements on the
importance of materials almost at the expense of
all other aspects of architecture may cause no sur¬
prise in retrospect, since common opinion has al¬
ways regarded the New Brutalism as chiefly a mat¬
ter of exposed materials and untreated surfaces,
but this emphasis does less than justice to what
was in the Smithsons’ minds at the time. The extra¬
ordinary collection of topics in the last paragraph
(with its inexplicable terminal query) may give some
clue to the other things that pre-occupied them:
preoccupations summed up in the sentence “We
see architecture as the direct result of a way of
life”.
Like many others of their age, they were trying to
see their world whole and see it true, without the
interposition of diagrammatic political categories,
exhausted ’progressive’ notions or prefabricated
aesthetic preferences. That world, and their way of
life in it, included Gropius as a crumbling reputation
from the remote past, the works of Le Corbusier as
ancient monuments, CIAM as a corrupt parliamentary
body in need of anti-oligarchic reform — and Ameri¬
can product-design and advertising as the inheritors
of the drive and adventure that had gone out of
‘Modern Art.’ — and of much of the skill, in detail¬
ing and formal composition, that had gone out of
architecture. As was to become clear later:
“Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the point if
it does not take into account Brutalism’s attempt to
be objective about ‘reality’ — the cultural objectives
of society, its urges, its techniques, and so on. Bru¬
talism tries to face up to a mass-production so¬
ciety.” 15
But in 1954-55 this facing-up process had only just
begun and lacked the sophisticated techniques that
were to be contributed by the Brutalists’ associates
in the other arts. These activities, such as the pio¬
neering studies of the ‘Pop’ arts made by Lawrence
,s 'Architectural Design’, April 1957
47
Alloway and others, will be discussed in the next
chapter, but an early attempt to face up to a more
primitive society and its ‘way of life’ in architecture,
may be seen by simply turning the page of January
1955 issue of ‘Architectural Design’.
There, the Smithsons review the work of Vladimir
Bodiansky and Atbat-Afrique, especially the low-
cost housing in Morocco. They draw a comparison
with their own socio-architectural intentions at Gold¬
en Lane and go on : 16
“What we termed back-yard ... they term ‘patio’,
drawing on their knowledge of Arab needs from the
area of greatest migration ... where the established
collective system includes outdoor living-space.
Whereas the Unite was the summation of a techni¬
que of thinking about ‘habitat’ which started forty
years ago, the importance of the Moroccan build¬
ings is that they are the first manifestation of a new
way of thinking.”
To judge from a ‘Statement of principle’ that ap¬
pears at the bottom of the same page, but might
have been more effective as part of the preceding
Brutalist statement, the new way of thinking was to
include not only a close study of the way people
actually lived, but also a fair degree of permis¬
siveness in design as well:
“It is impossible for each man to construct his own
home.
It is for the architect to make it possible for the
man to make the flat his house, the maisonette
h i s habitat...
We aim to provide a framework in which man can
again be master of his house. In Morocco they have
made it a principle of ‘habitat’ that each man shall
be at liberty to adapt for himself.”
The thin, stick-and-matchbox aesthetic in which this
ethic of permissiveness was offered in Morocco
hardly accords with the idea of Brutalism as an
architecture of massive plasticity and coarse sur¬
faces, but what the Smithsons meant by Brutalism
at this time certainly included social ethics, to
which they attached quite as much importance as
to formal architectural aesthetics. The growth of
this ethic in their minds is inextricably entangled
with the process by which other people came to
identify the New Brutalism with ‘Part brut’ and other
expressions of the aesthetic of the time, while the
attempt to visualise the total environment in which
this ethic could be realised involved them in a
course of action which led to the destruction of
S CIAM. These two aspects of the New Brutalism —
‘Part brut’ and the reform of urbanism — are of such
pivotal importance at this point in the argument that
they are worth tackling out of their strict chronologi¬
cal position in this historical narrative.
16 ‘Architectural Design', January 1955
»8» r *‘1iTOF
Ji4-|S
Tt irm
IUUU
(> 4 U
■fflaa
4
51-53
Alison and Peter Smithson;
City of London (England), Golden-Lane
Housing, competition design. 1952
51
Elevations, section
I) K I.K l.hv K I. \ N li I o I' I lit •>
G 0 L D E N
L A N E
a oi ;
52
General plan at street-deck level
53
Typical apartment plans, elevations, site plan
im. \\ j.rui- n n
5 2
0 0
T
i
i
\
\
\
1 • t\gk
^ w Hav e „ " a "d
/x ft Gallory
60 3
^ ,r S a "d slre
®„urtyar d e|
61
f” ol ° C ' ed c
M 'nci
63
l^ or 'Or Cjf
^^‘iGry-spacc
54
66/67
Johannes H van den Broek and Jacob B Bakema; Rotterdam
(Holland), Lijnbaan. 1953
66
Detail of construction of upper facade
67
General view
64/65 ,
Johannes H van den Broek and Jacob B Bakema; Rotterdam
(Holland), van den Broek House. 1953
Living room, and entrance facade
57
M*
,VP»
3
71
Edouardo Paolozzi; Bronze Head. 1954
72
Jean Dubuffet; Monsieur Macadan. 1945
.1 Brute, non and other art
r„e .earn that assailed A.
wenty-two Brutatet images J* ^ " onsls , e d
libition ‘Parallel o \e p a0 | 0 zzi and the two
»f Nisei Henderson, photo,..-
Smithsons. Henderson, P his in _
phe., is »^»r"-side?a W e and
fluence on the oth jt was he w ho had
admitted by them , ’ word 'image’ then
invented their spec.al use of ^ « Qn the
his influence ^ and M. -ulp-
other hand, is not a circles all over the
— ,s known “"earned hin. a place In
world. As early as 1952 11 ^ alongside Jack .
Michel Tapie s bo „ . i ean Fautrier, Georges
son Pollock, Jean Dubu ^ n £e 'anti-artists’ of the
Mathieu and other repre a | re ady (and justifiably)
period. Dubuffet s wor and this term could
being described as art ^ work 0 f Paolozzi
equally justifiably be app ■ ^ away {rom coa rse
as, in 1952 - 54 , , e m °^ cies 0 f primitive figuration
abstraction towards a P busts which have the
_ esp ecia 1| y the s ma dimensio ns. The Smith-
look of Dubuffet in «ir ^ ^ connection wl h
sons were certainly ent that was establish-
the emerging ant.-w p ao , ozzi , but they also
ed by their friendship w ith it. Like many
had a more direct acq “ a ' had bee n brought up
other young Eur °P®* pollock for the first time,'
against the art of J«**° by the European art-
and without any prepara of 1950 . The im¬
press, at the ‘Bienne d > V e" he intel , ectual edifice
pact of these pictures J? c|assica | theories
which architects had was t0 be extremely
of measure and prop de | aye d, because Pollock’s
. Rut it was delay , _ , „„ mn i P telv
tradition (and with it, the dominance of France in \
European intellectual life) then Pollock was im-
mediately remembered, and became a sort of pa-
tron saint of anti-art even before his sensational
and much published death.
A picture of Jackson Pollock in his studio - one
might almost say ‘a sacred ikon’ - was one of the
images in ‘Parallel of Life and Art’, but there were
very few other references to ’art’ in any of t e
culturally-accepted senses and the section of the
exhibition which was labelled ‘architecture included
a Mexican mask and a plate from a book of Vege¬
table Anatomy, as well as a number of subjects that
would normally be regarded as engineering struc¬
tures, or settlements that would normally be regard¬
ed as too primitive to be counted as ‘architecture.
In all sections, the exhibition dealt primarily with
bizarre or anti-aesthetic images culled from news¬
papers, magazines, scientific and anthropological
textbooks, or extreme modes of vision such as X-
rays and micrographs. All had clearly been select¬
ed because of some very direct (and often inexpli¬
cable) emotional impact on the organisers of the
show, and many carried that impact to those who
came to see it.
Although ‘Parallel’ was one of the crucial stages in
the demolition of the intellectual prestige of ab¬
stract art in Britain, it is worth noting that it ac¬
cepted one form of abstraction without question,
that of photographic reproduction in two dimen¬
sions, and put a high value on the qualities of gram
and ’chiaroscuro’ that resulted from printing-down
- V ' gross over-enlargements on unglazed photographic
paper. This particular aesthetic was not absolutely
original - something like it had been seen during
1951 both in the ‘Triennale di Milano’, and an ex¬
hibition 'Growth and Form’ in London (with which
Henderson had been involved at one stage) but the
exploitation of these visual qualities to enhance the
impact of subject matter that flouted humanistic
61
73
Jackson Pollock In his studio. 1950
a certaln “” ,M ■>'
importance was not missed .'The lnni:ivatlon wh °se
it coloured many hostilp r v » ^ IS n ° doub * that
Wh6n * final >y ^Ppea^ed Ude * BrUWist
conceptions°oTth^NewV*tT* ^ different
architectural gossip and criticism ISm C ' rCulatin 9 in
1 Certain thoughtful modernists with a ‘hp*
background (a group which hao beaux-arts’
contribution to architectural dise^’ 3 major
still hopefully regarded 6^1^^ . En 9 land )
1 or dre , a search for the tradition^ x * rappel a
architecture as they understood thlm" ^ 15 ° f
methods oTtSesInitEo^lad ° f ** busine ^-'ike
their collaborators (enainpo c ° nvinc ed certain of
that the New BrutaL m W as r '; a ud a 0therCOnSUltants )
ir ,i,sin,hebest “i«„" S nrSV“^
against the acceoted r rev °lution of the youna
reaction against the categorised 8 ° f ^ a ° d Art ’ a
connoisseur or aesthete a of the
direct physical and emotional tl0n m fav our of
-ol«ame„ li „ thecreali>epro a U«p erience ^ |n
AN three estimates of the M«, D
a strong element of truth thoun^tl!*'' 8 ," 1 Containe d
sion was not, in fact, to establish 0® classic 'st ver-
Brutali sm had passed out J £ 0* UntN after
Smithsons, had ceased to be L l ^ 8 of the
thetic’, and had become merelJ„ 1® n0t an aea '
, m h 0dea of arc hitecture ** "**#«
the situation stood in 1954 5 s h ' SIXties - As
mate involved a comni , 55 ’ however, this esti
Brutalist concept of orderThT^ 8 **"*" 9 ° f the
classical, but topological- 'J ? 0ncept Waa not
site such as that of the Sheffield UnivensttyOro^ec^
would have involved judging the case on its merits
(or rather, dominant factors) such as the land-form,
the accommodation required and the finance aval
•able, rather than in accordance with some pro
established classical or picturesque 'schema in j ®
usual manner of post-war architecture; and
execution of the buildings would certainly hav
been a calculated affront to the accepted convey
tions of architectural detailing at that time — * G *
would have been no exquisite surfaces, fine- ra ^
metal-work or harmonious colours, no integration
architecture with the other plastic arts, etc, e •
Constructed, Sheffield University as conceive
the Smithsons would have been the most extre
Brutalist building ever realised, and the whole s
sequent history of Brutalism would have been
ferent.
But it still might not have been the most compl
example, however extreme, because it did no 1
dude one ‘other’ architectural possibility that w
m the Smithsons’ mind by 1955, a possibility
owed much to their involvement with the an 1
movement. Their prototype ‘House of the Futu
assembled early in 1956, was a serious attemp
Fop Architecture’ comparable to the ‘Pop Art w
has subsequently appeared in Britain and Ame
e early date may cause some surprise, since
r >s commonly regarded as a phenomenon o
V* Ies> but the group who assembled ‘Para e
i e and Art’ were among the very first, anyw e |
® WOr * d > to direct their attention to the visua
r\ i T . imager y °f much advertising and corn
i * a ,. es * gn — hence the references to these 0 ^
Fro e ., New Bruta| ist ‘manifesto’ of January eS \
* e poin t °f V| ew of Paolozzi, say, the m ^
f I m ® ncan advertising was as a source °f p ° t j ve
ar | outra 9eous images (comparable in em ggg
Jffect to those in ‘Parallel’) but as early as &
" . e was insisting on the need to stu y
g Jf symbol °gy’ of these advertising images-
ren h f- went farther than this, and seem to h
kitrh rded American magazine advertisements
of s!' en equipment - for instance, as demonstrate"
? 3 7 t ay °! "fa - a way of life as complete and n*
s " U . nderslo °d cultural overtones as those
deta\ !? pboto 9 ra Phs of the kitchen of the Ka s
VHIa C Sav 0 ye a,aCe ° f ^ kitChen ° f Le ^
wer^^x^ * be Pi n "hoard, such advertisenrie n
wall r+h rn o r ° m the ma 9 a zines and displayed ° n .
(the Smithsons contributed an article entitl
‘ARk’°+ ay L. We Co ^ ect Ads’ to the student ma 9 aZ '
Futur ab ° Ut the same time tha t the ‘House of t
had th ^ be ' ng desi 9ned), and on the wall they
as gy 6 .° ub * e sta tus both of emotive images, an
and arS a s * y * e a standard of t' nlS
Britain 68 ' 90 ! day-to-day existence in post-W a
vertkp C0U ^ n0t bo P e to emulate. Outside the a
|.*f ments, the only tangible visions of such a
ouc safed in London were occasional Ame rl
an-made cars, belonging to embassy officials °r
dignitaries (private citizens could not imp° r
em) and, hence, the reference to the Cadillac ' n
74/75
Alison and Peter Smithson; House of the
Future (prototype). 1956
Bathroom, and cut-away drawing
the 1955 ‘manifesto’. The sight of such an artefact
could be disturbing for more than one reason.
It was, as has been said, solid testimony of ‘an¬
other world’, but it was also an affront to good
taste’, and accepted progressive sentiment. Not
only were ‘progressive’ habits of thought still domi¬
nated by older, anti-American members of the Left,
but from the time of Sigfried Giedion’s book ‘Me¬
chanisation takes Command’, or even earlier, the
styling of US commercial products had been specif¬
ically regarded as ‘bad design’, so that to admire it
in public was to adopt an anti-conformist or 'angry
young man’, attitude. But for those whose views had
not been polarised by the politics of the Cold War
(or the politics of Modern Architecture) it was pos¬
sible to admire the Cadillac or Plymouth for non-
polemical reasons. Unlike European architecture, US
car styling seemed to have tapped an inexhaustible
supply of new forms and new symbols of speed and
power, the sheer aesthetic inventiveness d splayed
by Detroit designers in the middle years of the fif¬
ties was a constant reproach to the faltering imagi¬
nations of European architects and the industrial
designers they appeared to admire (eg Nizzol. of
Olivetti). But even more unlike British designers
and architects in particular, the American stylists
exhibited a dazzling command of details, joints and
connections, the three dimensional coordination of
different materials, and skill in fitting accessories
and components into the total design (rather than
sticking them on as afterthoughts as in British car-
design and buildings).
The House of the Future was, in a sense, a re¬
statement of Le Corbusier’s Citrohan/Citroen pun;
a house built like a motor-car. But those aspects of
» On the 'Citrohan' house, see: Le Corbusier 'Vers une archi-
x » «« n Q931 section on 'Maisons en s6rie , his first extended
nf nrefabrication and mass-production of buildings, in
automotive technology which Le Corbusier had re¬
jected as un-architectural (notably technical obso¬
lescence and physical expendability) were accepted
by the Smithsons as an inevitable part of the mass-
production situation, and were fused by them with
one of the most traditional of architectural concep¬
tions, the patio-dwelling. The design had been com¬
missioned for the annual ‘Ideal Home exhibition in
London, and what the Smithsons offered to baffled
(but often enthusiastic) visitors to the exhibition was
a simple box without external windows, and a door
on only one side, so that the three other sides could
be packed hard up against other similar buildings
to give high residential densities even in single-
I storey developments. All the rooms were lit from
continuous glazing looking into a small oval patio in
the centre, the height of the roof being varied in
a continuous curve to give daylight-factors suited
to the use and aspect of the rooms around the
patio.
The level of technical equipment was clearly intend¬
ed to surpass even the vision vouchsafed by the
American advertisements they had been collecting,
and this preoccupation has persisted in later imag¬
inative projects for domestic design that the Smith-
sons have produced. The proposed form of struc¬
ture represents a different kind of raid into US in¬
dustrial design however: the double plastic shell
was conceived as the equivalent of the panelling of
a car body. Thus, no single panel was interchange¬
able with any other in the same house, only with its
twin in another house. This situation, long since ac¬
cepted in the construction of industrially produced
shells (such as car-bodies, aircraft fuselages etc) of
course runs exactly counter to ideas current in
architectural circles on prefabrication (eg all the
various prefabricating projects associated with the
names of Gropius and Wachsmann) where the at¬
tempt has always been to work towards a single
universal element that can fulfill any role the struc¬
ture requires. The practical economics of the kind
63
76-78
American advertisements for kitchen-
appliances and cars. 1953-55
FR1GIDAIRE BUILT-IN COOKING
fold-back or counter-top units-
which one for your new kitchen ?
76
78
Mm I" If,.- Will II, ll„ ^ f
of design philosphy exhibited by the Smithsons’
structure implies a volume of production rivalling
that of a major automobile manufacturer, and (in
the kind of Open Society to which the Smithsons
seem devoted) marketing techniques comparable to
those of Detroit. The House of the Future was
therefore ‘styled’ as much as it was designed. A
complete aesthetic of panels and joints (avowedly
modelled on automobile practice) was devised, and
the exterior even boasted a certain amount of token
brightwork that underlined its affinity to the chro¬
mium styling of a car or, indeed, the domestic ap¬
pliances inside. Even the possibility of an annual
model-change was entertained.
In spite of its patio-plan, this was still a very ex¬
treme conception for its time (in many ways much
more extreme than lonel Schein’s contemporaneous
plastic house designed for the ‘Exposition des Arts-
Menagers’) and as so often in the history of Bru-
talism, the attainment of an extreme position was
followed by a withdrawal to a more traditionalist
position. The Pop-Art patio-house was not to be,
and when the Smithsons produced another patio-
house mock-up later in that same year of 1956, it
revealed very different intentions and produced a
very different effect.
Concurrently with other international avant-gar e
activities in the plastic arts, during the early nine¬
teen-fifties, there had been an attempt to establisi
an English ‘filiale’ of the Paris-based Groupe es-
pace’. Since British artists like Paolozzi, Turnbull,
Hamilton or McHale had long since abandoned the
rather naYve tenets of ‘integration of the arts e
by the ‘Groupe espace’ at that time, t e projec
came to nothing, but the painters, arc itec s, scu P
tors and critics who had gathered to iscuss e
proposal continued to meet and final y eci e o
stage an exhibition (called, for reasons now im pos
sible to reconstruct, This is Tomorrow ). e s
consisted of environments or constructions devised
by groups each consisting (more or less) o a pain ,
a sculptor and an architect, but there was no
all dogma or programme covering e ™ ° e
testation. Each group worked as 1 1 ’
Lawrence Alloway wrote in an intro uc i
catalogue:
“The independent competing groups^ no^agree
£ * * ' u
Groupe espace’. , .
In ‘This is Tomorrow’ the visitor is exposed ’ ® P “.J
effects, play with signs, a wid ®^er make of art
and structures which, taken *09 as fac _
and architecture a many-chan e ^ ^
tual and far from ideal standards
side.”
ax-i , instructions could be
At least one of the group-const^ jnsjde
regarded as an attempt t° br 9 hard HamHton
the exhibition: John Voelcken fi t p Art
and John McHale put together* anyw P here
manifestation to be seen .n any £ 9^
m the world, complete with ^ made great
imagery science fiction q uot ^' topology and
P ay with communications th J wjth the \ anti .
o he, topics generally assoc. : ^ time From
class.ca! approach in En 9 la " aded ri ght across to
his extreme, the exhibits shad^ 9^,
n th h ,l r 6Xtreme ° f ° rder y f r Although the Hen-
in the Groupe espace’ manner. .
derson/Paolozzi/Smithson exhibit canno be fitted
neatly into this sequence at any one po , it mus
be said here that theirs was a trad.t-onahat ej„it,
a very long way removed f rorT \ M H .
tremism of Voelcker, Hamilton and Mctiaie.
Their -Ratio and Pavilion’, though put together out
of non-traditional materials such as aluminium and
corrugated plastic, exhibited an architectural form
that would be described nowadays by critics like
Vincent Scully as “essentially a a te ‘
menos-enclosure” and was described by the group
themselves in the exhibition catalogue m terms of
.. necessities of human habitat ... the first neces-
64
1
79
Alison und Peter Smithson; House of
the Future. 1956
Kitchen area
sity is for a piece of the world, the patio. The second
necessity is for an enclosed space, the pavilion.”
Such an appeal to fundamentals in architecture
nearly always contains an appeal to tradition and
the past — and in this case the historicising tenden¬
cy was underlined by the way in which the innumer¬
able symbolic objects made or gathered by the
group were laid out on beds of sand in a manner
reminiscent of photographs of archaeological sites
with the finds laid out for display. One or two dis¬
cerning critics, who knew their Smithsons and were
acquainted with Henderson’s preoccupations with
the folkways of the East London poor, described the
exhibit as 'the garden-shed aesthetic’ but one could
not help feeling that this particular garden shed,
with its rusted bicycle wheels, a battered trumpet
and other homely junk, had been excavated after
the atomic holocaust, and discovered to be part of
European tradition of site planning that went back
to archaic Greece and beyond.
The Smithsons were already beginning to exhibit
that fascination with ancient planning that was to
take them to visit the original sites in Greece, and
was ultimately to affect their own ideas of site or¬
ganisation in a practical manner in the nineteen-
sixties. Had they abandoned their extreme anti¬
traditionalist position of 1953? Certainly they had
made a move in the same general direction as did
many leading figures in the world of Anglo-Saxon
architecture on both sides of the Atlantic as the
neo-Classical revival set in (that is, from Philip
Johnson’s synagogue at Port Chester, completed in
this same year of 1956) but theirs was not Classi¬
cism in that sense — the pavilion was not placed
axially in the patio, and the planning ‘grid’ was more
like an irregular version of Japanese mat-planning
than a classical system of modules. Further, when
Peter Smithson came to present the results of his
Greek investigations in public lectures in 1959 1B ,
18 Reprinted in the ‘Journal of the Architectural Association’,
London, February 1959
80/81
Jacques Coulon and lonel Schein; Maison
Plastique (prototype). 1956
Model and general view
65
personal observation on the actual sites a
vinced him that the Greeks used no systems
portion nor geometrical devices in their P
but had proceeded in a manner analogous ^
Sheffield University project, the various an( j
being sited for convenience, oriented for r>
topologically related by connecting ‘routes • ^ a
If this was classicism, then it was clasSlC ^ s deli¬
very diffuse and generalised kind. If 1 r-^yffet ° r
tionalism, then only in the sense that ^ erTlse |ves
Paolozzi were traditionalist in occupyi n 9 n pre-
with that traditional subject of art, the u g we re
sence. Still it was clear that the Srni s ^ se apP'
withdrawing imperceptibly from their c ^ fa-
roach to an Other Architecture comp * ra w jthdra* al
Pi^’s conception of ‘un art autre’. But the ja ||y in
was very gradual indeed at this stage* ? S sta tem en *
their own eyes, as one may see from t ,s 0 f th e
(made in response to a very dull discus ^
New Brutalism in ‘Architectural Design)
Published in April 1957: J<w >s
eter<w
If academicism can be regarded as y 0 b-
answer to today’s problems, then obviou ^ rC p,jte c
jectives and aesthetic techniques of a re ge. ^
^ re (or a real art) must be in constant ot i*n %
me immediate post-war period it seeme and ^ e
fo show that architecture was still P osSI ’d f° rr
determined to set against loose planning .
abdication, a compact, disciplined archi e s j* ua
Simple objectives once achieved change b 0 '
l0n ’ an< ^ the techniques used to achiev e st 3
come useless. So new objectives mus
bhshed. wh e |e
f r °m individual buildings, disciplined on 0 „ t o
y classical aesthetic techniques, wo n 1 , \\W ^,
an exar nination of the ‘whole’ problern 9 n
associations and the relationship that gr0 W
community has to them. From this study , a 0S
a completely new attitude and a non-da*
thet'e. |nt if '*
Any discussion of Brutalism will miss the P ^pt i0
hc> eS u- n0 ^ ' n ^° account Brutalism s ujecti' ,e
ZJ 0bjectiva about ‘reality’ - the cultural M 0( O
talits° Cl * ety ’ ur 9 es > its techniques an s oci 0 \
and ^ tri6S t0 face «P ^ a mass-product^
dra 9 a rough poetry out of the con
werful forces which are at work. ty |j S t' c9 '
P to now Brutalism has been discussed sVt
y> Pereas its essence is ethical.” ^s,
butVc^ 6 k 6nt ' S not a| together clear m j fc>u ||d
ing th ai I be re iated to a real and comP s pu
lishej i ^ Ugden bouse at Watford, which ^ th
Smithsn 3 6r * n tbe year - blere one ca t th 0 s '.. t
cation nS aerious| y facing the realities f pu' 11
at the t- Wh ' Ch English suburban houses w eS t‘
s ymbolis l m e th Under a " the P ressureS reiu<f ice !-ng
the local h he er| t re nched aesthetic P 0V/ &rd l0
site surl, ; eaUcrac V. a routine and •*"£>*
brick houses 60 * "!| 0atly by routine and W 6 fe.
^haracWi-’ anc ^ usua l inadequ \ 0 ped
9 ru dging a d ^ ally ’ Peter Smithson de ^ the c°^
9 9 adm| ration f 0r the way in which th
John Voelcker, Richard Hamilton and
John Mc Ha| 0 ; London (England), section
of exhibition 'This is Tomorrow- 19 56
83/84
Alison and Potor Smithson,
LondnrWF^ a ?'°j Zi N, ' 9el Henderson;
85
Philip Johnson; Port Chester (N.Y., USA),
Synagogue Kneses Tifereth Israel. 1956
Entrance front
For illustrations see page 77
on soeculator-built houses of the area extracted
e maximum of ostentatious effect from the poor
ock of status symbols that could be contrived
om the economically possible range of materials
liefly brick and timber. But he did not accept their
U y i nhipetives’ and set out to do as honest a
t limitations of the loci 'reality', including
* “ m e economical!, possible range I of m.t.nals
ie sam result, like the other houses in
i 0 U area*was basically a simple brick box, but with-
it the Smithsons contrived some more enterpns-
iq spatial arrangements than are common m Bnt-
-h suburban architecture, and tried to illuminate
em with windows placed according to internal
eed rather than the outworn suburban conventions
lerived from the Arts-and-Crafts tradition.of he
. th century. The result has neither the
homeless styling of the House of the Future, nor
he Timeless 'hecessif,' of the Pavilion in the Patio
- and it received an extraordinarily hostile response
~ Lcp two extracts from the the correspondence
JS | o of the ‘Architectural Review ’ 19 will show:
;°'Tscms to mo that in .heir efforts fo avoid do-
■ thp same (as speculative builders) they have
r not better or even as well, but worse. Now I
done ot be e , USQ they , ack ability.
cT« bo t! .Ca-o -Of equipped wi.h a sound
theorv (Norman Harrison):
‘'The y house at Watford, Hertfordshire, ... is a
shocking piece of architectural illiteracy in plan,
construction and appearance” (Fred Lasserre).
‘Illiteracy’, 'not equipped with a sound theory . had
the Smithsons for once actually achieved ant.-archi-
tecture, V even 'une architecture autre ? They had
certainly flouted the picture-book conventions of
gracious living that had so long circumscribed the
ambitions of modern domestic architecture, and
although‘the result was not so extreme as, say, the
Sheffield University project, timid souls recognised
i 11 I _Uiillrlinn
« iA..k:f.ni. IF at Pothavu’ (lisrAmber 1957 and February 1958
67
\<T^
t
.
86
Dr jve-in cinema
5.2 A note on ‘une architecture autre
What is a subversive proposition in arehitecture -
which, as an art, has been forced, by ®‘ r *
cumstance, to absorb many concepts and usages
felt to be hostile to its best traditions and yet has
survived? There was something in the air in he
middle of the nineteen-fifties that suggested that a
really subversive trend was emerging, something
that the traditions of architecture could not absorb
and it was to label the intimations of such a trend
(discernible in the Smithsons’ Sheffield scheme)
that the present author coined the term une^archi¬
tecture autre’ in December 1955. Whatever I thought
I meant by the term at the time, it was snapped by
Udo Kultermann (’Baukunst und Werkform .August
1958) in an article subtitled ‘Ein neugeknupfter Fa-
den der architektonischen Entwicklung (A newly-
tied thread of architectural development) but he so
narrowed the meaning of the term, to cover i e
beyond the purely formal alternatives to ‘rectangu¬
lar’ architecture, that it is necessary here to re¬
establish the full meaning of the phrase in terms of
the New Brutalism. .
As has been implied already, the term was corned
by analogy with Tapie’s concept of «un art autre,
and was intended to stand for something equally
radical. That is, an architecture whose vehemence
transcended the norms of architectural expression
as violently as the paintings of Dubuffet transcend¬
ed the norms of pictorial art; an architecture whose
concepts of order were as far removed from those
of ‘architectural composition’ as those of Pollock
were removed from the routines of painterly com¬
position (ie balance, congruence or contrast of
forms within a dominant rectangular format — we
argued much whether Pollock paid any regard to
the edges of the canvas when dribbling his action
paintings); an architecture as uninhibited in its re¬
sponse to the nature of materials ‘as found’, as were
the composers of ‘musique concrete’ in their re¬
sponse to natural sounds ‘as recorded’.
Thus, the final and absolute abandonment by ^ ^
que concrete’ of any traditional kind of sea
even the twelve-tone series, and with it the a ^
donment of any kind of harmony or melody ( ,n ^
sense accepted in the theory of music as * aU ^ ten t
the ‘conservatoires’) gave a measure of the e
to which ‘une architecture autre’ could be eX ^ etr y,
to abandon the concepts of composition, synn
order, module, proportion, ‘literacy in P al ^ e pted
struction and appearance’, in the sen . se , aC ^ c0 les
in the theory of architecture as taught in t e ' c j er p
des Beaux-Arts, and piously preserved ,n ^ e p0 st-
Architecture of the International Style an ^ eC \yxe
war successors. By this token, ‘une arc ^ .j ea
autre’ ought also to have abandoned even a ban'
of structure and soace — or rather, it oug f U nc-
w ^ ^ ^ I W vA I I W IA W w 9 • y I |
don the dominance of the idea that the P r,n ^ ^ke
tion of an architect is to employ structure
spaces. ,. tructure/
Many would agree that to abandon this s ^ 0 g 6 th-
space synthesis is to abandon architecture a ^. on D f
er, but all that is really abandoned is the n ^ s ^ c e
the art of architecture that has been curren
the Renaissance. Society at large has neV ^p 1 j n gto
much interest in this notion, because it has n ^ oC j e ty.
do with the architect’s function in relation °. ve had
What the corporate and private patrons, w ° manC led
to represent the desires of society, have e c tiviti® s
of architects is environments for human ^ por
and symbols of society’s cultural °bj eC y rUC ture
most of human history some kind of space s ^ er 0 f
artefact has been the unquestioned rna s n evoi*
satisfying both these desires, but this waa ^ ss s0
the only possible solution, and it is even _. n c j n e-
today. A modern example would be a drive v0 | e n-
ma, where the structure above groun e ^ y ra n-
closes no space, and the cultural symbo s a^ ^ Qre
sient light-play. But one can adduce mua n ^\s,
primitive and genuinely a-formal example nC j ose d
entirely devoid of structural elements or • e ^ j n .
volume. The camp fire of a nomadic tribe^
stance, creates an environment for ^ urTia but
activity and marks it with a powerful sym ’ are
the size and shape of the useful environm ^
defined by no structure, simply by the aa .
fire, the strength and direction ot the wind, tjvitio8
siology of the individuals involved and the a
they are performing. thiSj
Given a genuinely functional approach sU fj\^ 0r y Q f
no cultural preconceptions, and the full a ^ ure »
modern mechanical services, an ‘other archi c ^
might well employ structure merely as a wa ^ QU ^
holding up other environmental controls, wl ^
endowing it with the monumental signifj can ^
enjoyed when massive construction was a mo
only environmental control mankind possesse , ^
with these controls it might or might not happ e ^
define a space without endowing that volume
the cultural significance loaded on it by socie
trapped within volumes defined by massive s
tures. ,
Formless (sic) buildings, such as Frederick K' es er s
‘Endless House’ or Herb Greene’s dwelling louse
at Norman, Oklahoma, only superficially fulfil this
concept of ‘other’. The Sugden House comes nearer
to it, in some senses, precisely because it is put
together out of traditional materials, and this accen¬
tuates its underlying deviations from the norms of
constructing environments out of those materials.
So Fred Lasserre observes the Smithsons are illi -
erate’, and have not employed the grammar asso¬
ciated with domestic planning in brick and wood,
but seems not to have entertained the possibility
that they might be literate in another language, em-
ploying a different grammar.
But more fundamentally ‘other’ is the approach ot
a designer like Buckminster Fuller, especially as
the architectural profession started by mistaking
him for a man preoccupied with creating structures to
envelop spaces. The fact is that, though his domes
may enclose some very seductive-seeming spaces,
the structure is simply a means towards, the space
merely a by-product of, the creation of an environ¬
ment, and that given other technical means, Fuller
might have satisfied his quest for ever-higher envi¬
ronmental performance in some more ‘other’ way.
The truth of this has been dawning on architects
for some time, and many have come to adopt an
attitude of extreme hostility towards him, usually
couched in the form of ridicule and harping on cer¬
tain obvious questions, such as, how do you make
an entrance in a dome? (The answer, curiously
enough, is the same as for a tower-block by Mies
van der Rohe or an Unite by Le Corbusier - you
raise it off the ground and go in underneath.) The
Smithsons are to be included among those who
have adopted this attitude to Fuller, so are practi¬
cally all others who could carry the name of Bru-
talist. In the last resort they are dedicated to the
traditions of architecture as the world has come to
know them: their aim is not ‘une architecture autre
but, as ever, ‘vers une architecture’.
87
Frederick Kiesler; 'Endless House' project. 1957
88
Herb Greene; Norman (Oklahoma, USA), House on the Prairie.
1961
89
R. Buckminster Fuller; Carbondale (Illinois, USA), architect's
own house. 1960
68
69
For illustrations see page 78-84
5.3 The end of an old urbanism
Even if no slogan or label had emerged sponta¬
neously to identify the Smithsons and their inter¬
national network of like-thinking friends, it would
still have become necessary to invent a name of
some sort for the purposes of journalism and hi¬
story-writing. Firstly because their work represents
a recognisable trend; secondly, and more urgently,
because of the role they played in the politics of
the Modern Movement. In the absence of the name
Brutalists’, they would presumably have been known
as Team-X’, and remembered as the destroyers
of CIAM.
The relationship between Brutalist ideas and the
collapse of the original ‘Congr&s Internationaux
d Architecture Moderne’ is direct, the activities of
Team-X in bringing about that collapse deliberate
and conscious at least in the sense of a deter¬
mination to see their own ideas prevail, no matter
what the cost, because they were convinced that
they were right and their opponents wrong. How¬
ever, these ideas were not overnight growths, nor
was the formation of the Team-X alliance a sudden
secret conspiracy; the process by which the grand
old movement was demolished goes back to the
beginnings of ClAM’s post-war activity, and the
creation of Team-X was part of the deliberate
policy of the movement’s older members, even
though the outcome was not what they had intended.
To recapitulate briefly: from the seventh congress
(Bergamo, 1949) onwards, it was the custom of
architectural students (especially from Britain) to
flock to CIAM to re-establish contact with the inter¬
national Modern Movement, to sit at the feet of its
great masters and to acquire those non-parochial
standards of architectural value that were discussed
in section 1.2 At Hoddesdon in 1951, and above all
at the crucial ninth congress at Aix-en-Provence in
1954, this mass movement of students gained in
strength. Aix, indeed, was almost overwhelmed by
the crush of students and young architects, for
whom it was a kind of consummation to their ‘grande
affaire with the Latin South, with the Mediterranean
and, above all, with Le Corbusier. As is well known,
a party organised by Le Corbusier’s office on the
roof of the newly completed ‘Unite’ at Marseilles was
both the crowning moment and major scandal of
the Aix congress.
As is so often the case with such emotional occa¬
sions as this, the high feelings of Aix were followed
by a kind of post-orgasmic reaction:
“We of the younger generation received a shock at
Aix in seeing how far the wonder of the ville radi-
euse’ had faded from CIAM.” 20
So wrote Team-X in the preamble to their program¬
me for the tenth congress at Dubrovnik. The con¬
tent of this statement is as symptomatic of the
troubles of CIAM as were the names of it signato-
20 Reprinted in: Oscar Newman, 'CIAM '59 in Otterlo’, 1st volume
of the ‘Documents of Modern Architecture’ edited by Jurgen Joe-
dicke, London 1961, which is the best compact source for the re¬
ferences and quotations in this section.
ries. Looking back now, it is clear that the compo¬
sition of Team-X (so called because they were
entrusted with producing a programme for CIAM-X)
represented an alliance of genuinely like minds,
rather than a temporary grouping of dissident ele¬
ments: Bakema, Candilis, Gutmann, Howell, van
Eyck, Voelcker and the Smithsons were becoming
increasingly tied by genuine friendship and admira¬
tion for one another’s work. On the other hand it is
difficult not to sense an odour of cynicism in the
motives of the older CIAM in entrusting this group
with congress X — some genuinely believed in giv¬
ing the young an opportunity to prove themselves,
but for others the only way to silence the tide of
criticism they could feel among the younger mem¬
bers was to confront them with the realities and
responsibilities of power, in the hope that this would
tame them.
But, with four British members, Team-X was half-
committed to the English view of CIAM and its
future before its meetings ever began, and the es¬
sence of that view is contained in the quotation
given above: CIAM was seen as the guardian of the
sacred vision of ‘la ville radieuse’ and the older
members were censured for having lost faith. In
point of historical fact, of course, this view is a
travesty of what CIAM originally set out to do. Le
Corbusier’s vision of ‘la ville radieuse’ was only one
of a number of town-planning concepts and urbanis-
tic philosophies that had been contributed to ClAM’s
pool of ideas. There were no reasons for expecting
other founder-members to abandon their own urban
visions in order to support Le Corbusier’s, and even
Jos<§ Luis Serfs 'Can our Cities Survive?’, the of¬
ficial compendium of CIAM town-planning, synthe¬
sises a number of viewpoints, even though it was com¬
piled after political difficulties in other parts of
Europe had allowed the French group (and, there¬
fore, Le Corbusier) to establish a virtual hegemony
over CIAM.
But the war, and other causes, had allowed that
hegemony to become dominant in the minds of the
young, and successive volumes of the ‘Oeuvre com¬
plete’ had taught them to interpret the Athens
Charter through Le Corbusier’s eyes, and to see
some form of ‘ville radieuse’ as the corporate am¬
bition of CIAM. Also there is no doubt that the
post-war aspect of the pre-war heroes — middle-
a 9 e d, greying, world-weary and wise in the ways of
diplomatic compromise — must have come as a
shock to those who had previously known them only
in glamorous photographs taken during the Athens
congress, or in the fervent writings of their youth.
Now inclined to be a little sceptical of the pos¬
sibility of applying even the simple concepts of the
Athens Charter among the conditions then ruling
in war-ruined Europe, preoccupied with husbanding
the structures and resources still in existence rather
than making ‘tabula rasa’ and starting again, they
must indeed have looked, in the eyes of the young,
like traitors to the great vision.
Soon after Aix, and a few months after their first
Brutalist manifesto, the Smithsons gave their view
70
of the relations between Team-X and the CIAM
‘establishment’ in their earliest published statement
on town planning 21 :
“Each generation feels a new dissatisfaction and
conceives a new idea of order. This is architec¬
ture.
Young architects today feel a monumental dissatis¬
faction with the buildings they see going up around
them.
For them, the housing estates, the social centres
and the blocks of flats are meaningless and irrele¬
vant. They feel that the majority of architects have
lost contact with reality and are building yesterday's
dreams when the rest of us have woken up in to¬
day.”
They then go on to attack the Garden City concept
(ever a favourite target in Britain) and then the
‘Rational Architecture Movement' which one knows
from other observations made by them, to mean the
town-planning ideas (on housing in particular) of
Gropius and his followers as set out in ‘Can Our
Cities Survive?’:
“The social driving force of that movement was
slum-clearance, the provision of sun, light, air and
green space. This social content was perfectly
matched by the forms of functionalist architecture,
the architecture of the Academic period which fol¬
lowed the great period of Cubism, and Dada, and
de Stijl, of the ‘Esprit nouveau’. This was the period
of the minimum kitchen and the Four Functions, the
mechanical concept of architecture.”
The complaint about the ‘mechanical concept’ of
the ‘four functions’ refers, of course, to the basic
postulates of the Athens Charter, which separates
out: Work, Residence, Recreation and Circulation
as the four functions of the city. Even the older
members of CIAM recognised that this analysis was
inadequate, but did not reject it, merely adding new
functional categories such as ‘the historic centre’
(‘Can our Cities Survive?’) or ‘the Core’ (CIAM-VIII,
Hoddesdon, 1951). But the young were for a root-
and-branch rejection of all the Athenian categories,
which they frequently damned as ‘diagrammatic’,
and the progress of their revolt was summarised
thus by Theo Crosby 22 :
“The CIAM congress at Aix-en-Provence in 1954
(sic) saw the first crack in the theoretical solidity of
the Modern Movement. The Smithsons showed Hen¬
derson’s pictures, met Candilis (who had produced
some remarkable Moroccan housing), J. B. Bakema
of Holland and several young men who also found
the Athens Charter obsolete. They formed a group
to exchange information. This group, Team 10, was
entrusted by CIAM to prepare the programme for
the 10th CIAM congress at Dubrovnik in 1956 (ap¬
parently on the principle: if you can’t beat them,
join them). The method of analysis for the projects
submitted was, roughly, in terms of human associa¬
tion rather than functional organization, thus mark¬
ing a radical break in architectural thinking.
21 ‘Architectural Design’, June 1955
22 Introduction to ‘Uppercase 3*, London 1960
At Dubrovnik it became evident that CIAM, with
over 3,000 members, had become too diffuse to
cover any subject other than by the merest genera¬
lisation. There was also a cleavage between the
founders, old, famous and very busy, and the fol¬
lowers, young, underworked and ravenous for pow¬
er. The congress broke up, leaving Team 10 in pos¬
session of the field. Most national groups dissolved
themselves. Team 10 continued to meet, in Paris
(1959) and Otterlo (1959), but they met as individu¬
als.”
Of course, CIAM did not immediately vanish, and
there was a good deal of recrimination and back¬
biting among the survivors, which persisted, well
after the Otterlo congress, in a lengthy correspond¬
ence in all the world’s leading architectural maga¬
zines, about precisely the kind of legalistic point
that tends to obsess the minds of old men in defeat
— whether or not Otterlo had the ‘right’ to decide
that “the name of CIAM could no more be used by
participants”, to quote Bakema’s summary state¬
ment after Otterlo had broken up. 23 The plain fact
was that the old men were defeated — at least with¬
in the framework of the old CIAM. It was evident
that much had been lost — the middle generation,
particularly the Italians like Ernesto Rogers and
Ignazio Gardella, had been deprived of the oppor¬
tunity of succeeding to the seats of power vacated
by the old; distant members like Kunio Mayekawahad
been deprived of the psychological support of mem¬
bership in a great international organisation; even
the youngsters seem to feel vaguely cheated that
their later meetings (eg Royamont, 1962) did not
carry the prestige or attract the world-wide atten¬
tion accorded earlier meetings. If Team-X were
left ‘in possession of the field’, it was because even
their potential allies had fled, with the exception of
the few, chiefly in Europe, who at that time agreed
with them that town-planning is primarily an archi¬
tectural discipline, and that the word ‘city’ still stood
for something of positive human value expressed as
an emotive artefact — as an ‘image’.
What did this view mean to them? The preamble to
the Dubrovnik instructions again provides valuable
clues:
“Each architect is asked to appear, project under
his arm, ready to commit himself...
We are seeking the ideal habitat for each particular
place at this particular moment...
... we are interested only in the outcome of this
collaboration (with sociologists and other special¬
ists), not in diagrams of relationships or analytical
studies, but as architecture.”
There is an implicit rebuttal of Le Corbusier in
these quotations: when he first conceived the ear¬
liest version of the ‘ville radieuse’ it was the gene¬
ralized solution for an ideal site, avoiding ‘all spe¬
cial cases, and all that may be accidental’. The
young, in unknowing pursuance of a definition of
23 Reprinted at the end of 'CIAM '59 in Otterlo’, see also his
letter circulated to all the magazines which printed the ‘anti-
Otterlo’ declaration of Giedion, Sert, Le Corbusier and Gropius.
I
Brutalism once offered by Toni del Renzio — Do
as Corb does, not as Corb says” — applied them¬
selves instead to the proposed built environment of
a particular place with all its accidental and special
features, the unique solution to an unique situation.
For even those who felt required to reject the cate¬
gories of the Athens Charter as ‘diagrammatic’ could
accept the ‘Unife’ as the ideal habitat for Marseilles
in 1950. Concurrent with this emphasis on the re¬
alities of a particular place (comparable with the
Brutalist insistence on the real nature of particular
materials etc) is the insistence on commitment, that
the architect should be so personally involved with
his proposed habitat that he would be prepared to
defend it against detailed scrutiny by his fellow-
professionals.
To the young who had recently emerged from archi¬
tecture schools, especially in Britain where the ‘cri¬
ticism’ system was still a workable eductional tech¬
nique, the submission of one’s work to public exa¬
mination by a jury was a work-a-day purgatory, a
customary form of intellectual discipline. To some
of their continental contemporaries it appears to
have come as a novel and welcome exercise in
existential self-examination, but can one imagine a
Gropius, a van Eesteren or a Neutra submitting his
work to the indignities of hostile questioning by men
forty years his junior? Even the middle generation
had difficulties in acknowledging the criticisms of
the young, as may be seen occasionally in the
published record of the Otterlo congress.
But if CIAM broke up because many of its older
members knew that their work was too heavily com¬
promised for them ever to bare their architectural
souls in public (and, worse, they knewthattheyoung
were fully aware of this, and were waiting to pounce),
the legends of some of these older members surviv¬
ed untarnished, especially that of Le Corbusier, who
had survived the disaster of Dubrovnik with Mikoyan-
like cunning. His personality, his vision of the ra¬
diant city survived everything, and continued to
dominate the minds of the Team-X/Brutalist con¬
nection even after the Athens Charter had been de¬
clared obsolete. This dominance can be seen clear¬
ly enough in the following short article or, rather,
‘exhortation’, by the Smithsons which appeared in
the ‘Architectural Review’ at the end of 1957, and
can well stand as a representative sample of their
writings on town planning. .It commences with an
editorial introduction which is, effectively, a profes¬
sion of support for their views 24 :
“Throughout the past quarter of a century, from the
first congress at la Sarraz in 1928 to its virtual dis¬
solution last year... CIAM has brought together the
masters of Functionalist architecture — Le Corbu¬
sier, Gropius, van Eesteren and many others - in
discussion on the problems of their art, and of city
planning in particular. Their findings, formulated in
methodically drawn-up documents, the most notable
being the Athens Charter of 1933, now begin to ap-
74 ‘Architectural Review’, November 1957
pear too diagrammatic, formalistic and legali st,c ^
and here, Alison and Peter Smithson, who have
ticipated in much of ClAM’s post-war activity, s
out a case for rephrasing ClAM’s functionalist
ets on a more humane and pragmatic basis.”
Then follows the article proper, under the
‘Cluster City’ (the word ‘cluster’ comes ultima ^
from the American urbanist Kevin Lynch, and P
sed into British circulation through Denys Las ^
who called his residential towers in East Lon
‘cluster-blocks’) 25 : $
“The modern architect is interested in the imp 1 &
tions of his building in the community and ,n
^culture as a whole. His first concern is with th e
neral problem, from which the specific soluti 0 ^^
the particular situation is evolved. The Decla r ^ ^
of the first Congress of Modern Architecture (C ^
in 1928 was concerned not only with the thro ^
over of outmoded formulas and the Academi eS, ^j,
with the actual functional basis of the new a r ^ ^
tecture, with economics, with the rational is at'
building, and also with town planning, for the
tional City was the natural extension of a Func 1
Architecture. is
The situation for the modern architect t°^ a |j S ts
fundamentally the same, we are still functiof a ^^
and we still accept the responsibility for tho ^^l
munity as a whole, but today the word f u . nC ^jrty
does not merely mean mechanical as it did
years ago. Our functionalism means accepts nS
realities of the situation, with all their contradm
and confusions, and trying to do something ^
them. In consequence we have to create an J u j|t
tecture and a town planning which — throug ^
form — can make meaningful the change, the Q r
the flow, the ‘vitality’ of the community. ^
There must be inherent in the organisation of e '‘
building the renewal of the whole community s . g
ture. Take, for example, the problem of rebu' 1 ^
hree houses in an existing street; the hoUS c a
each side of the street form, with the street itse ’|d
is met urban idea; the three new houses s ^._jj,
no just live off this idea, but should give c .
cation a sign, of a new sort of community s t
ure. But this cannot be done unless the a rch ra |
as a more or less completely conceived 9®
idea or ideal towards which all his work is aimed-
It is now obvious that the functional-mechanic*’
of 0f V™" 1 Panning and the Cartesian *® sth e|e -
of the old Modern Architecture are no longer rj*
sunn L t J° rbusier ’ s d ream of a Ville Radieuse
thT , by a ge ° metr y of crushing banality-
that is h we see jt now _ thep|ans g oveUS as I *
s the pattern on the tablecloth at the ‘Vieux P a
which is indeed, where it may have originated-
eren are our reactions to the same image- '
sparking-point, excitement; ours, art-historic* 1
nosity).
« cnuumsiantiai account ot his discover*
cluster concept in 'Architectural Design', February 1959, refs"
particularly to an article by Kevin Lynch that had app eared
Scientific American’, April 1954.
72
Yet the dream was real enough, and is still relevant:
‘Here we have a promenade for pedestrians rising
on a gentle ramp to first-floor level which stretches
before us as a kilometre flight of terrace. It is flanked
by cafes embowered in tree-tops that overlook the
ground beneath. Another ramp takes us to a sec¬
ond promenade two storeys above the first. On one
side of it is a Rue de la Paix of the smartest shops:
the other commands an uninterrupted view of the
city’s limits. Yet a third ramp leads to the esplanade
along which the clubs and restaurants are grouped.
We are sheer above the expanse of parks with a
tossing sea of verdure plumb beneath us. And to
the right and left, over there, and further away still,
those gigantic and majestic prisms of purest trans¬
parency raise their heads one upon another in a
dazzling spectacle of grandeur, serenity and glad¬
ness ..‘Those hanging gardens of Semiramis, the
triple tiers of terraces, are ‘streets of quietude’.
Their delicate horizontal lines will span the inter¬
vals between the huge vertical towers of glass, bind¬
ing them together with an attenuated web ... That
stupendous colonnade which disappears into the
horizon as a vanishing thread is an elevated one-way
autostrada on which cars can cross Paris at light¬
ning speed ... When night intervenes, the passage
of cars along the autostrada traces luminous tracks
that are like the trails of meteors flashing across
the summer heavens.’
This quotation is from a piece called ‘The Street’
which originally appeared in ‘L’lntransigeant’ in May
1929. It is a description of the ‘plan voisin’, a project
of 1925 which applied the principles and building
types of Le Corbusier’s earlier project ‘une ville
contemporaine’ (1922) to Paris.
We still respond to this dream, but we no longer
believe in the means by which he imagined it could
be achieved. His city is a colossal, axially-organised
chess-board.
The general idea which fulfils these requirements
is the concept of the Cluster.The Cluster —a close-
1 knit, complicated, often-moving aggregation, but an
aggregation with a distinct structure. This is per¬
haps as close as one can get to a description of the
Inew ideal in architecture and planning.
Given this description, the problem of building the
three houses in an existing street is one of finding
a way (whilst still responding to the street idea)
to chop through the old building face and build up
a complex in depth, of providing a suggestion, a
sign, of the new community structure.
It is traditionally the architect’s job to create the
signs or images which represent the functions, aspi¬
rations and beliefs of the community, and create
them in such a way that they add up to a compre¬
hensible whole. The cluster concept provides us
with a way of creating new images, using the tech-
<1 niques which have been developed to deal with the
problem of a mass-production society, the tech¬
niques for example of road and communication en¬
gineering. Many solutions have been put forward to
deal with the problem of traffic — motorways joining
population centres, urban motorways within com-
munities, peripheral controlled parking round the
old centre, out-of-town shopping centres, off-motor-
way factories and residential dormitories, so utions
which either disperse the energies of communities
or integrate them in an entirely new way.
The accepted concept of the city is one of concen¬
tric rings gradually decreasing to the edges in re¬
sidential density and ground coverage, with a radia
road-pattern from the historic nodal point. To this
pattern has lately been added concentric self-con¬
tained low-density satellites (isolated around Lon¬
don, connected at Stockholm). i
In the Cluster concept there is not one ‘centre bu
many. Population pressure-points are related to in¬
dustry and to commerce and these would be e
natural points for the vitality of the community to
find expression — the bright lights and the moving
crowds.
These commercial and industrial pressure-points are
connected by motorways to frankly residential dor¬
mitories and dormitory-used villages. It is useless to
pretend that life is so simple that we can all ‘live
where we work’ - we have to accept population mo¬
bility and be one step ahead of it in controlling the
form it takes. Creating new images both for the new
elements themselves and tor the old elements which
have to be transformed.
We must think out for each place the sort of struc¬
ture which can grow and yet be clear and easily
understood at each stage of development. The word
Cluster gives the spirit of such a structure, and exist¬
ing planning techniques, such as the control of re¬
sidential densities, comprehensive redevelopment
and compulsory purchase, give the power (at least in
England). There seems no reason why more freely-
flowing, more varied, more useful communities can-
not be constructed.”
This single article will, for the purposes of the pre¬
sent book, serve to represent the typical contents of
a Smithson article on town planning of this period.
Most of the themes and preoccupations seen here
recur throughout thfeir other writings on the subject,
and are simply enriched, rather than transformed by
additional thematic material — especially concerned
with the automobile, or the transience and perma¬
nence of urban buildings, after they had visited the
USA. Whatever is added, the central theme remains
always the ideal solution ‘for a particular place at
the present time’, with every new building seen as a •
successful, or unsuccessful, prototype of a new urban
order.
The whole ‘cluster of ideas' is best summed up in one
magisterial ‘image’ — the scheme with which they won
a prize and great kudos in the ‘Hauptstadt Berlin’
competition in 1958. Their acceptance of the reali¬
ties of the situation’ went to the extent of retaining
most of the existing street grid of the part of Berlin
in question, and then giving the city a completely
new pattern'of pedestrian circulation on open decks
(analogous to the terraces of the ‘plan voisin’) two
or three storeys above the streets. This device of
the two contrasting superimposed grids has the air
73
of a direct rebuttal of the chess-board geometry of
Functionalist town planning, and may even be a
conscious gesture of contempt for the defeatist at¬
titude of Gropius at CIAM-VI (Bridgewater, 1947)
when he said that Berlin could not be substantially
replanned because the existing network of streets
sewers and other services represented too big an
investment to be disturbed.
But the ‘image' of ‘Hauptstadt Berlin’ was not only
an irregular network of upper pedestrian walks as
seen on plan (though that pattern has been much
copied) it w as also the means of vertical circulation
that connected the old, ground-level grid with he
new one above it. This was to be an escalator dtv
m which vertical transportation was to be almost
more the norm than horizontal movement. This was
both the image of the new elements and tho •
of the old .h„ had bean tnJSd fo, ,h. TT
meaning of the streets at ground levJ u ? rba "
be quite different now that the i a '? dear,y
the city had moved upl the J r ^ C ' rCUlati ° n ° f
t B o U bI h seen iS emSn e g
of Brutalist town planning - the're 1 a e D d D eVe '° pment
Picturesque method. It needs to ho ppearan ce of
this is more a matter of S be emphasised that
thinking than of Picturesque visuluomo me . th ° ds ot
was not really so surprising when POSltlon ' Th 's
both the Brutalists and the proDon 0 "* 6 reCalls that
Picturesque had rejected B ^
matter of principle: both would oh ? mng as a
voisin' because it was an L a ,l» the ' plan
board; both sought for a pragmatic 0 D? amSed Chess '
Iba. »ould .II™ communities .ol“T?r h ° d
ended’, to use a term not yet curront lor ( ° pen '
is difficult to see how the Smith V? 1958 ) and !t
‘accepting the realities of the on
1 -~ ... gi v&ee section 1.2) Aoain tu ..
ed by the ‘Architectural Review’ for’ ^t 6 f
s-stmg that when new buildings were to IT’ in ‘
into existing environments them +u inserted
'syn.pa.be,IC b„, s.liuvtlel '.T 1 " >»
time’, differs from the Smithsons’ nmhi° tHe ' r ° Wn
new houses in an existina + u- i? 6m °* three
of voice and choice of words emol ,' 6 ^ the ton «
the same conclusion P ° yed ,n arriv 'ng at
rar - *
plored here - suffice it to give as an™* ^ fUlly 6X "
cument submitted to CIAM v n example a do-
printed in the official report ‘U ^ 18 in 1937 ( re '
1938). This document, headed ‘The' S ^ Loisirs ’ of
contains some striking anticipate*
forward in Cluster Citv and J ftheideas Put
sistence on the importance f S P ecially of the i n .
and population mobility as n„r , man assoc 'ation
brovnik papers: P * forwa rd in the Du-
‘‘Or, la socteto n ’6tant q Ue | a ri4l .
il imports de les grouper | e D i^T" des h °mmes,
que possible en favorisant ainl: i harmo "ieusement
74 *' les Changes intel-
lectuels et commerciaux de toutes sortes. C est le
reseau de circulation a une echelle nouvelle qui de¬
termine le plan de la ville future.”
Though couched in the Gallic rhetoric of pre-war
CIAM prose, these opinions were the work of one of
the most conscientiously English of Englishmen,
H de Cronin Hastings, the intellectual driving force
behind the neo-Picturesque campaign of the 'Archi-
tectural Review’. ,
Symbolically, the gap between the Brutalists and the
Picturesque Townscape movement may be said to
close in 1962, when the Smithsons employed Gordon
Cullen, greatest of the Architectural Review’s ‘Town-
scape’ draughtsmen to prepare the prespectives of
their Economist building. But by that late date the
old polemical differences of the early fifties were
becoming smudged over. As late as 1959 Lawrence
Alloway in ‘Architectural Design’ was still trying to
keen the party lines firmly drawn by reminding his
readers of the “bitter knowledge of the sweet taste
of the Festival of Britain whimsy, the crown of the
British Picturesque revival”, but in less than a year
after that, ‘Architectural Design’ carried an. article
on Romantic Gardens by none other than HF Clark,
whose articles on this very subject in the Architec¬
tural Review’ had been the first harbingers of the
This*dosing of the circle in about one decade re- -
presents many causes at work - shifts of fa ^ ,on ’
Ls of polemical urge, idealism making rta peace
with pragmatism, dreams accommodated to the re¬
alities of the situation’, the Englishness of Englis
architects overcoming their interest in exotic in¬
fluences, the backyard proving a more pressing'prob¬
lem than the patio. In any case, what happened to
the English Brutalists did not necessarily happen to
the red of Team-X, and the planning of a Bakema
or a Candilis always retained a degree of diagram¬
matic idealism that disappeared from the work of
the Smithsons, Howell, Voelcker or the others who
had submitted rural housing schemes as the British
contribution to Dubrovnik. Somewhere in the process
what the English were doing had become separated
'from Brutalism as the world was coming to under¬
stand it. In common international usage, the word
was shedding its urbanistic and technological over¬
tones, and becoming narrowed to a stylistic label
concerned largely with the treatmen of building sur¬
faces. It was possible for one of the contributors
to the ‘Architectural Design’ symposium on the New
Brutalism in 1957 to refer to “the more specifically
Brutalist elements such as the untreated surfaces
and exposed pipes and ducts and conduits . The
Smithsons might object that this missed the point
(see section 5.1) but such was the prestige of Le Cor¬
busier’s ‘beton brut’ that the world was becoming
convinced that this heroic material was ‘specifically
Brutalist’ - and, for this, one building was respon¬
sible. Though works by Bakema, or Aalto, already
existed that might have given substance to Brutal¬
ism, it was Le Corbusier who stamped his personal
75
11111111111111111111
ml 11 1U 1111 1 11111II VuVnYm ii i mi'i mu
100/101
Richard Lleweiyn-Davies and John Weeks; Rushbrooke (Suffolk,
England), Village Housing. 1957
Front yard, and house-plan (scale 1:200)
VILLAGE
-• i
”■1
mu
m
L
E
103
Typical floor plan (scale 1:200)
1 living room
2 balcony
3 kitchen
4 larder
5 toilet
6 entrance
7 escape stair
8 bathroom
9/10 bedrooms
11 main stairs
12 escape stair
13 lifts
14 drying yard
15 access bridge
N
11 .
!
The geometry < Mch " r 1
U Carh,.sin's early urban v,sas
"cere base,I. grates la lane bent as
banal as that af the pattern „J a gager
tablecloth. '1. from which it may «* '
lan e been , ler.ee, I. II. Tlaingb //»« « "/
interest la ns Ia,lay as a garni m ■a ■
historu. la he Carl, us,er ,1 ur« the
germ "J an urban visum llmt erealril
a convincing image of a city. *-
. city’
105/106 . t . te r
Alison and Peter Smithson; Illustrations to Article C u
1957
Contrast between Le Corbusier’s early pattern-making, P GrU en s
by upper three illustrations, and his Jaoul Houses, V.cto
master-plan for Fort Worth, and the Smithsons Cluste
last three all automobile-determined
architectural consequences on a civic
scale in a project like I ictor (Irucn s
pedestrian core for I'url II orth, 0, or
the authors' idea for a nil/ of popu¬
lation clusters , 7. each working or
living in types of buildings that have
their men appropriate relation to
motor traffic, and are described on the
next two pages.
CLUSTER (Il\
Ahso^nd Peter Smithson; Berlin-Hauptstadt (Germany).
competition design. 1958
tjpper-level pedestrian network (shaded, scale 1:2000)
106
Towers and slabs of Cluster city
108
Central area
Interchange between upper deck levels and ground, showi g
escalators
For illustrations see page 93-101
6.1 Les Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly
The word ‘Brutalism’ was circulating, but the general
architectural public remained unconvinced by the
polemics of the Smithsons or the apologetics of
critics like the present author, and were still puzzled
by its meaning and hard put to find a building that
seemed to match the word. The steel and glass of
Hunstanton, even when allied to the rough imagery
of ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ seemed too thin, too
elegant to fulfil the implications of violence and
crudity carried by the word ‘brutal’.
Then came the Maisons Jaoul in 1956, and the vac¬
uum of architectural meaning was dramatically filled.
The later history of the New Brutalism has much less
to do with the theoretical propositions of the Smith-
sons than it has tcTdo with the prog ress and per-
mutations of the style invented by Le Corbusier for
these two-houses-on-one-podium at Neuilly. They
‘became’ Brutalism, and although sympathetic cri¬
tics like Denys Lasdun might protest that “the Jaoul
houses, likeable or not, should be hailed or chal¬
lenged, but not classified” 26 , the very phraseology
of the protest suggests that he knew it was already
too late. They were classified Brutalist, and became
the common standard bywhich the Brutalism of other
buildings could be evaluated. However it is worth
noting at this point that Le Corbusier seemed reluc¬
tant to apply the word ‘brut’ to them, preferring to
speak of their ‘briques apparentes’ and 'gros beton
arme’. Also James Stirling, breaking into print with
an article comparing Jaoul with Le Corbusier’s villa
Stein at Garches even before the Jaoul houses were
finished, nowhere called them ‘Brutalist’ - perhaps
because he was close enough to the Smithsons to
know what they meant by the term.
Nevertheless, the Jaoul houses were acceptable to
the Smithsons, who made frequent reference to them
and included them among the illustrations to‘Cluster
City’ 27 . On examination, the Jaoul houses show many
features that take them close to the definitions of
Brutalism already current or about to be enunciated.
Quite apart from their emphasis on materials as
found’, their power as an ‘image’, etc, the rela¬
tionship of the two houses to their underground car¬
parking was a fair example of a building as a proto¬
type of a new urban order — hence the illustration
in 'Cluster City’.
Yet, what causes the numerous imitations and deri¬
vatives of Jaoul to be called ‘Brutalist’ has nothing to
do with prototypes of a new community structure,
and a great deal to do with raw concrete and ex¬
posed brickwork. Maybe there were predisposing
causes — architects naturally looked to Le Corbusier
for authoritative statements in architecture; the work
of a great established master would clearly prevail
over the theories of the young English upstarts,
especially when that master was the one who had
put the concept ‘brut’ in circulation. Also, Le Cor¬
busier’s earlier work already contained the basic
24 ‘Architectural Design’, March 1956
37 'Architectural Review', September 1955
architectural proposition on which Jaoul was based,
so that his admirers were prepared for it. This archi-
^ tectural prototype was his last previous house in the
western suburbs of Paris, the PetiteMaison de Week¬
end (as the ‘Oeuvre complete’ calls it) in Boulogne-
sur-Seine, of 1935. Here the archaizing tendency so
clear in Jaoul is already visible, in the ‘propylaeum’
spanning the path that leads to the pool, in the
use of mass-concrete vaults and load-bearing
walls, the sentimental ity about “mat erials friendly to
Man”, — visible brick, random masonry and wood —
plus an enforced budgetary economy that drove him
back into a proto-Brutalist morality — “les elements
de construction etant les seuls moyens architec-
toniques”.
Certain post-war projects had developed this theme
on paper, increasing the emphasis on archaism and
primitivism, notably the ‘cite permanente’ at la
Sainte-Baume (where the walls were to be of ‘pise’),
the very influential ‘Roq et Rob’ hotel-project for
Cap Martin, a year later in 1949, and more specially,
the project for the Fueter house on the Swiss side
of Lake Constance, which resumes the themes of
1935 on a domestic scale once more, but with pre¬
cisely the air of ponderous ‘angst’ (it looks like an
air-raid shelter) that was required to turn ‘materials
friendly to man’ into ‘matieres brutes’.
The Jaoul houses, as built, are less cowering and
neurotic than this. They present sizable two- and
three-storey elevations to outward view (where the
constricted site permits such views) and each eleva¬
tion presents a layered composition of vertical slabs
of coarsely-laid brickwork, separated by horizontal
beams of plank-shuttered concrete and windows,
while the end-walls show a cluster of exposed vault
ends (also in ‘beton brut’) framing compositions of
wood and glass. The same r epertoire of materials
is exposed in the inie.nQrpwith the addition of oc¬
casional plastered walls and the dark tiling of the
underside of the vaults (miscalled ‘Catalan’ by Le
Corbusier). The inner face of the infill of the vault
ends reveals a composition of shelving and cup¬
boards among the glazing, as part of Le Corbusier’s
aesthetic of the ‘fourth wall’, and this led James
Stirling to observe that this contrivance was "symp¬
tomatic of Le Corbusier’s recent attitude to surface
depth. Windows are no longer to be looked through
but looked at, the eye finding interest in every part
of the surface impasto...” The use of the painterly
term ‘impasto’ in this context is telling: elsewhere
Stirling observes that the “wall is considered as a
surface and not as a pattern”, and it was at this
time that English critics were discovering that the
Brutalist sculpture of Paolozzi was “an art of sur¬
face, not of mass”.
Brutalism, as a going style, proved to be largely a
matter of surfaces derived from Jaoul, in association
with certain standard three-dimensional devices ta¬
ken from the same source - . at the external cen¬
tre point of these vaults, bird-nesting boxes are
formed, and occasionally concrete rainwater-heads
project...” (Stirling) - and a few others, notably
gargoyles, derived from the chapel at Ronchamp and
84
85
Le Corbusier’s Indian houses, and exposed concrete
walling, also derived from Indian works like the
S hodan house at,Ahmedabad (1956). But in spite of
hese Jn^|anborrow)ngs, the Jaoul houses remain
| the * P ^ al S T C - ° f BrUtalism as a ^yle, and this
must be largely attributed to the fact that Jaoul’s
architecture implies simultaneously acquiescence in
IH JJn^nf t0 ' th f norms of European thought’
If the Indian houses did this, too, ttafart was of no
consequence, since departures fm m rk .
technological myths of Modern ArZ 3 '
cusable in India (or so it was to k®'^ ex ’
countries like EnalanH In those European
simultaneous sympathy an^V 0 ! 0 " 131 ' 51 hab ' ts ° f
persisted among the educate I °, n 6mpt for ln dians
of Jaoul’s crude and Drtit t r 5 ^- But the use
in Europe was a shock to -TV- 0 buildin 9 techniques
nal habits. C °" StrUCti °-
to encounter the Jaoul he '* Was “ dist urbing
. ^e Champs Elysees ' anTf i"™" ha ' f a of
point out later in the article thaVth' 1 1 ^^ Wh ' le to
ian ,m “ WitH ' adderS ' hammer s and
abandonment of that oree P '° n "- Sensing an
dental sociology- that Stirlinqv"°" With ‘t'anscen-
C ° m Ro "e, had once idem if a mte " ectual mentor
z ;° r **- mSss-«*•
hat the Jaoul houses “are h„-n ’ Stlrlln 9 maintained
hejtatusquo^This is not alto intend ed for
Parana ^'tk ° r9anisa 'ion of th^T ** tfUe ’ becau se
parking , n the podium is an «V • 9r ° Up wit h its car
Pre-war years the i " man 'festo-bui| r |- SOme °f
cept the re a , I a ° U ' h °use s am " 9S ° f th e.
(and to tole I 68 , 01 the Durbanh ?**> to ac '
that many 0 f the ? C ° ntrad ictions anri'" 9 SitUation
WOnder « the h s e pl T e e n a d : X
n °t faded for Le Cn J ° f the V,|| e r l f ° rCed to
Ye ‘ ever y postla t USiert0 °- 6USe ’ had
bee na'muEirn; bUildin9 b V the o,,
Paol °«i) and one 2T' (t ° bor ^w a has
that Jaoul a | So she^ 9 ^ prett y conv- Phrase from
d'agrammatic forrrM^ be Corbusier" 10 " 19 ^ ar 9 u e
° f * he Athens Charte' 81 ' 0 ^ '^listi?^" 9 “‘he
habitat for a oe r ’ and tryino . Ca tegori es
C u Ular f'me (the place (NelSii^® the ideal
tKiS that 0n e? ies >- 't wa y) at that Pa *
..’ * ;
■ in “ >.
0rT10 graphi c
new volume of the ‘Oeuvre complete yo u ^ ^ ave
that Corb has already had the best ideas y°
just thought up”. oc than thist°
But there were further multiple valenci u j| ( ji n g is
the Jaoul image. Insofar as the manner o sS *, v e
routine categories o P r el71 ely
wase th.j
s r!5
>osit
the Jaoul image
a rejection of the rouim^ -
thinking’ inherited from the thirties, it j Waw
sympathetic to men half Le ^ or ^ usier f
lost patience with their ‘bien-pensant arme
tive elders. Not only were the ‘gros e ° p r0 positi° n
‘briques apparentes’ an affront to t e | ore front
that Modern Architecture “marches in 0 f no-
of technology”, but they were also a^^ ^
confidence’ in the Machine Aesthetic D hrasa)
- thirties”, (StiHmg s ^ un g.
••--fic to i r,c
be'
confidence III l! .w
Architecture of the thirties”, #
This too was extremely sympathetic
who were far too sophisticated st y,«5 • ^
lieve that the white machine-aest e ^ conor nic al r ^ t
any way inherent in the technic^ or twen^ eS . a j ei
alities of the building situation o a ppH e< ^ 5 a s-
thirties. They knew it had been ^ un dert he ^ jon
ah° u
thirties. They knew it hau unwi ^
transferred from post-Cubist P a ' nbn ^ eC j gen 1
sure of fashion, and to this disenc a ^
the Jaoul houses had the ring of . p|ac e * Q \
the state of architecture in that \.'^ e
^rinins ot s y t UfJ
- - architeciui^
danger was that, with the origins or you— .
their protective myths, the disench 3 fash j 0 n 0
were free to build cynically f° r ^
hour, and not for the future.
” White-walled Modern Architecture d' d n ° l
0n 'he British „n*;i a « fi r 1930- P reC
S i9 n ific g n th^1/
d< 9 oe K<’*! s
isely i°g e * pB - n ' ,fl
.ny c >
i2 ny j d° U
jO^ 6
^hite-walled Modern Arum—
0n 'he British scene until after 1930, P^ _
w on most of the inventors of the style ' .
e Continent and the style itself P roSCr ' ra ti° n W °ti e5 ’ io 111 t '|i
^ eontinenfal architect of Stirling's 9^ e tbe twe n gl J
nave mferred to the 'White Architecture o )in g s ti o* 0 <
WOuld carry less historical scorn ^^
" was
6.2 Flats at Ham Common, London
For illustrations see page 102-106
A degree of dexterity with the niceties of style is
not necessarily a disadvantage for an architect. If
he consciously works to a programme that calls for
the ideal solution for a particular time and a particu¬
lar place, he can hardly expect to apply a single fixed
style for every building. In finding the correct image
he will have to come to some conscious decisions
about the ‘Style for the Job’ - and this is a phrase
that belongs to the partnership of James Stirling
and James Gowan more than to any other design
office (even Eero Saarinen’s) in the recent history
of architecture.
But if ‘the style for the job’ was theirs, The New Bru¬
talisin' was not. They repudiated it both in spoken
and printed statements, largely on the practical
qrounds that it was not good public relations - a
word like Brutalism, they felt, frightened off poten¬
tial clients as easily as it did most English critics,
who tend to be both squeamish and hypersensitive
about words. But this led to difficulties: Stirlings
role as the man who introduced Jaoul to the English-
speaking world linked his name closely to what was,
by 1958 the canonical Brutalist building, and when,
in that year, the Stirling and Gowan flats at Ham
Common were completed, certain obvious af.imties
to Jaoul made it almost impossible for critics and
D orians to avoid calling them Brutalist. Agains
1 th eir designers’ wishes, the subsequent usage of
i the word has made these flats almost as canonically
Brutalist as Jaoul itself.
This purely linguistic shift in the meaning of the_ word
has also had the effect of edging some other build¬
ings into the Brutalist canon. When the ‘Architectu¬
ral Review’ published the Ham Common flats .t
associated with them (though without using the word
Brutalist) some earlier houses by the Smithsons, by
the variable partnership around William Howell and
Stanley Amis, and by Stirling and Gowan themsel¬
ves and it might with justice have gone onto include
^projected house by John Voelcker, al representing
a sudden upsurge of architectural quality ,n English
domestic design, all influenced in varying degrees
. paiiadianism, the Modulor, Marseilles, etc, and
m ca pable of being classed as ‘Brutalist’ without
doing undue violence to the term All were also built
. o simple repertoire of banal materials, chiefly
ZZ3&X- brick. n=. on,, ou, o, ,„npa«,,
Tor the nature of materials 'as found’ but also under
the compulsion of a grinding economic necessity
that made any but the most banal materials un¬
thinkable for small house-building. It was not only
philosophical preference that made these young
architects give heed to the ‘realities of the situation ;
a brisk realism was the price of their survival.
Stirling and Gowan’s conspicuous use of concrete
at Ham Common stems, in part at least, from the
fact that the iob was big enough to support the use
of this ‘luxury’ material. Against this unwonted free¬
dom must be set the ‘realities’ of the site, so ridi-
30 ‘Architectural Review’, October 1958
87
culously long and narrow (it was the back garden of
an old mansion called Langham House) that the
only way to accommodate the legally permissible
and economically desirable maximum number of
apartments (30) while respecting the legal rights of
adjoining land-owners to daylight and privacy, was
to organise them in three detached blocks — a large
one of three storeys, and two smaller ones of two
storeys with identical plans, except that they are
reversed left and right-handed. All three have brick
bearing wall structures (of‘calculated brickwork’fre¬
quently reduced to the minimum section capable of
carrying the load) and concrete floor slabs. In spite
of the fact that these slabs are flat, not vaulted, and
the planning is very different, the likeness to Jaoul
is striking. The most profound difference is too
subtle to register in many photographs — it is that
Ham Common is neat where Jaoul is casual and un¬
tidy. The brickwor k i s careful , the exposed shutter-
pattern ed^oncrete_is^ assertive than Le
Corbusier’s and brick and concrete are not allow-
ed to run messily tog ether (as at Jaoul) but firmly
separated by a thin recessed detail.
The dropped or ‘inverted-L’ window which makes
one or two modest appearances at Jaoul, here be¬
comes a major theme, even being bent around cor¬
ners with mannerist zest (the presence of strip win¬
dows under the edge of the floor-slabs, leaving them
unsupported for considerable lengths, and concen¬
trating the loads on narrow piers of brick, would be
unthinkable without a fully-calculated structure).
Projecting boxes, for ventilation, and water-spouts,
take up a Jaoul theme. Internally the fireplaces be¬
come free-standing sculptures, floor-to-ceiling piers
of brick carrying cantilevered concrete slabs — a
compact summary of the main themes of the ex¬
terior, and of the ingenuity with which a few hints
from the Maisons Jaoul have been expanded at Ham
Common into a complete, rich and flexible style.
But Jaoul is not the only ingredient of the style.
Stirling always insisted that if there was influence
from anywhere, there was another source besides
Le Corbusier, and that was ‘de Stijl*. At first sight
there may seem to be no connection between Ham
Common’s coarse natural surfaces and the smooth
abstract planes of, say, Rietveld’s Schroder house,
nor do these boxy sections and squared-up silhouet¬
tes appear to owe much to the hoverings and spatial
penetrations of neo-Plasticist aesthetics. Yet in the
two-storey blocks with their almost totally glazed
ends, one can appreciate the floor-slabs as planes
in space, and the use of the strip window under the
slabs on the side elevations gives a degree of visual
independence to horizontal and vertical planes,
while the handling of the woodwork at the corners
of the windows often comes very close to Riet-
veld.
But it is in the entrance-lobbies of these smaller
blocks that the possible intervention of a neo-Plas¬
ticist aesthetic is most apparent. Effectively these
lobbies are glazed links containing the stairs and
joining the three apartments on each floor. The glaz¬
ed side-walls are continuous from floor to roof-slab
88
because there is no intermediate slab at first-floor
level, and instead of a floor there is a bridge, hung
well inside the glass walls, connecting the three
entrance-doors to the top of the stairs. Thus, the
spatial effect of arriving on this bridge-landing from
the stairs is not that of entering a closed space-box
on a higher level, but of being raised midway up in
a continuous space. Nothing comparable happens in
Jaoul, nor is it ever common in Le Corbusier’s work.
But something like it had happened before in British
Brutal ism — the elevated walkways connecting the dif¬
ferent blocks of the Smithson’s Sheffield project —and
u was to appear again in Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s gi¬
gantic Park Hill apartments in Sheffield, the biggest
Brutalist building ever completed. The U-section pe¬
destrian bridge within a building complex is one of
the few Brutalist thumb-prints that is not directly
derived from Le Corbusier, yet survived creatively
into the period when Corbusian idioms dominated
the public idea of Brutalism. For this reason it is an
important tell-tale which facilitates discrimination
between Brutalism as a creative style and mere imi¬
tation of Le Corbusier. As Stirling and Gowan s later
work shows, they were far from being disciples of
the Master, and the use of the ‘topological bridges
and de Stijl spatial aesthetics at Ham Common gave
notice that, for them, the idiom of briques appar-
entes’ and ‘gros beton arme’ was to be exploited,
not slavishly imitated.
For illustrations see page 110-123
6.3 The Brutalist style
Ham Common focussed a good deal of attention on
Stirling and Gowan, outside Britain as well as within,
and led to some retrospective speculation about
their possible role as designers of buildings that
had appeared over the signatures of various well-
established offices in which they had worked as as¬
sistants. For instance, a workshop and scene-paint¬
ing building for the ‘Old Vic’ theatre in South Lon¬
don was published in the magazines just after Ham
Common, and the architects were Lyons, Israel and
Ellis, for whom both Stirling and Gowan had worked
during the months immediately preceding the set¬
ting up of their independent practice. The style of
the building was undoubtedly Brutalist - as the term
was then understood, not only in its frank exposure
of its materials, but also in the way that the pecul¬
iarities of the internal section (the need for a very
high paint shop and a tall, narrow slot through which
scenery could be taken across the road to the
theatre) were allowed to dictate the external ap¬
pearance, rather than being concealed by a tidy
external box in the manner previously in vogue.
In spite of this, neither Stirling nor Gowan was in¬
volved in the design process, which appears to have
been as follows (as far as it can be reconstructed):
the basic functional solution was proposed by the
middle partner Lawrence Israel, was converted to a
recognisable architectural ‘parti’ by the third partner,
Tom Ellis, and worked out in final detail by two as¬
sistants, Alan Colquhoun and John Miller (who later
followed the Stirling and Gowan example and went
into independent partnership together). The process
is worth examining: Israel’s original functional break¬
down would have established the basic topological
relationships between volume and volume; Ellis’s
parti would be a work of some architectural sophisti¬
cation (he was held in high esteem by all the young¬
er architects who passed through the firm, for his
architectural erudition as much as his ability as a
designer); and that sophistication would probably be
matched by that of the final detailing, for Colquhoun’s
erudition was (and is) the match of anybody’s. All
through the fifties he was one of the guardians
of the intellectual conscience of his generation of
London architects. Indeed, one of the most notable
aspects of the work of Lyons, Israel and Ellis
throughout this period was, quite simply, that its
quality was high enough, and the office organisation
flexible enough, for the partnership to attract, and
hold, first-class talent as assistants.
In this, it exemplifies the processes, motivations,
and organisational methods by which Brutalism in
Britain was tamed from a violent revolutionary out¬
burst to a fashionable vernacular. Wherever an esta¬
blished office can be found ‘converting’ to Brutal¬
ism, the presence of new assistants, fresh from the
schools (where they probably studied under Smith-
son or Stirling) and in touch with world events in
architecture, can usually be taken for granted. So
can an office organisation sufficiently relaxed, and
partners sufficiently sympathetic, to give them the
89
opportunity for creative work. So can the fact that
the controlling partners had recognised in Brutalism,
once called ‘the warehouse aesthetic’, a s tyle eco¬
nomically suited to the architectural require me nts.of
an economy-minded society.
On some such basis as this rests the efflorescence
of Brutalism as a commercial vernacular in Britain
in the six or seven years on either side of 1960, be¬
ginning, roughly, with the control-tower of Gatwick
Airport (Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall, 1957) and
running on to a sort of apotheosis in 1963—64 in such
works as the externally flamboyant but internally
conventional Eros House office-block in South Lon¬
don (Owen Luder, 1963), Churchill College, Cam¬
bridge (where it is married to traditional picturesque
planning concepts), a much-modified competition
winning design by Richard Sheppard, Robson and
Partners (1964), or the first quadrangle of Sussex
University, in which Sir Basil Spence’s office at¬
tempted to inflate the vaulted idiom of Jaoul to
monumental proportions (1962—63).
During the same period, the variety of architectural
expression possible within the nominally Brutalist can¬
on can be seen, for example, in the interior concrete
work of the Hille showrooms in London (1963) where
Peter Moro handles shutter-patterns and exposed
bolt-heads ‘a la Kahn’, with such delicacy that it re¬
sembles wall-paper, or in the penthouse-structure
of Denys Lasdun’s slightly earlier block of flats in
St James’s Place, where shutter-patterned concrete
had been raised (or debased?) to the level of a fine-
art material. Brutalism was certainly becoming ‘une
architecture’, an idiom, a vernacular style; an aes¬
thetic universal enough to express a variety of archi¬
tectural moods, even if it had lost some of the moral
fervour that had illuminated its earlier pretensions
to be an ethic.
In the same period, other trends loosely called Bru¬
talist can be seen coming to fruition. The younger ar¬
chitects at the LCC hat their revenge for the ideolo¬
gical difficulties of the pre-Kruschev regime, and the
fifties closed with an architectural triumph for their
viewpoint. The second phase of the Roehampton
development (Alton West) scorns Swedish or em¬
piricist design methods, and the slab blocks over¬
looking the sloping lawn which is the heart of the
development unequivocally reveal the Corbusian
convictions of their designers. Very much like Ham
Common, they mark a crucial stage in the evolution
of a general-purpose idiom from one of Le Cor¬
busier’s special cases, but whereas an equal sub¬
jection to a brick-building status-quo unites Ham
Common and Jaoul, the greater technical and eco¬
nomic resources of the LCC enabled the designers
of Alton West to go forward from the propositions
inherent in the ‘Unite’ at Marseilles.
By this time, the technical resources of the LCC
were considerably greater than those available on
the ‘chantier’ at Marseilles, more sophisticated and
more precise, with the curious result that the ex¬
tensive use of precast cladding elements gives an
air of that preoccupation with repetitive rectangular
geometry that Pevsner had identified as peculiarly
English. Anglicised, the coarse, swaggering, pachy¬
dermatous forms of Marseilles, become stiff, formal
and elegant in the ‘little unites’ of Roehampton. To
be fair, some other LCC variants on the theme (such
as the blocks at Bentham Road) have a less spindly
sub-structure and have more of the swagger of the
original, and some of the smaller blocks at Roe¬
hampton which exhibit more genuine ‘beton brut’
around the staircases at the ends (especially the
terraces of shops) also seem to have pioneered the
use of a Corbusian concept that had hitherto re¬
mained on paper — the narrow path, stepped or
ramped, passing through a terrace of deep-plan
units (here shops with apartments over and back¬
yards behind) which first appeared in the Sainte-
Baume and ‘Roq et Rob’ projects.
The end-walls and staircases of these blocks also
bear a distinct family relationship to the end-walls
and stairs of the residential blocks of the Portales
neighbourhood unit at Quinta Normal, outside San¬
tiago, Chile. It seems extremely unlikely that there
is any direct connection between the two schemes,
or that the architects (Bresciani, Valdes, Castillo and
Huidobro) had any direct acquaintance with the
LCC architects. Brutalism was becoming a style of
wide diffusion from its original sources, but those
sources still had sufficient authority to stamp a
fairly consistent image on all their derivatives, even
if the exact links in the chain of relationships can¬
not be established.
Sometimes, however, the connections are clear.
Andre Wogenscky’s house for his own occupation at
Remy-les-CItevreuses in France, is strikingly Cor¬
busian, and differently so from most of the English
derivatives — and for the very good reason that he
was ‘homme de charge’ in Le Corbusier’s office.
Where it differs from the English work is, for ex¬
ample, in the use of references to the chapel at
Ronchamp (rare in English Brutalism of domestic
scale) in the form of the boiler house at ground level
and in the structures on the roof, and in the use of a
few random windows here and there. But like much
of the English work it relies on Modulor dimensions,
makes extensive use of vertical shutter-patterns and
gargoyles (though these are the tapering Ronchamp
type again). Parts of the house, however, are clad in
white limestone slabs, almost in the manner of the
Master’s panelled facades of the thirties (such as the
Pavilion Suisse) and there are other devices, such
as the projecting-box brise-soleil which recall ear¬
lier work. Wogenscky, in fact, was not influenced
solely by the work being done in the office while the
house was being designed: his view of Le Corbusier
has greater historical depth to it, even a touch of
book-learning.
A similar eclectic and historical approach can be
seen in Brutalism of the Swiss school, not only in
obvious examples like Dolf Schnebli’s holiday house
at Campione d’ltalia, but also throughout the work
of such distinguished design teams as ‘Atelier 5’ —
Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber, Rolf Hesterberg, Hans
Hostettler, Niklaus Morgenthaler, Alfredo Pini and
Fritz Thormann. The most important work of this
team, Siedlung Halen near Berne, will be disco ^
later, but their minor works can conveniently ^ a |jst
viewed here as a contribution to a growing Br u ^
tradition. Their contribution to that tradition ' s n
standingly their skill in using a variety of Corb .^* |C jal
devices, large and small, to build up an artl ^ e \\i-
‘maniera’, which they employed with great ,n jt€ >
gence, verve and good taste, without ever ^ e d
welding it into an idiom as personal as that achi
by, say, Stirling and Gowan at Ham Common. the ir
For this reason they are often criticised ^ 0
eclecticism, even though a sympathetic crit,C dic a-
Neave Brown could say of their ‘eclectic P re
nil.
"... The eclecticism of Atelier 5 or any other f 9 fa jth-
with a similar attitude is something of an act o to
It affirms that if the future course is not cle ^ g{ ._
progress at all it is necessary to adopt the sue ^
ful forms and idioms of the immediate pas ’ e j i
thus avoid working endlessly over the same g r ^ js
or degenerating into a chaotic individualism-
therefore wise to choose the best source . • •
ally
and for Atelier 5 the best source was unequ' v< ^. ght
Le Corbusier. But they cannot be accused of s of
plagiarism, and this is due largely to their d ®P ina -
historical perspective on the master. New co ge
tions of given forms alter their meanings and ^ |dQ
new meanings are knowingly exploited. As
Rossi put it 32 :
“Also, forms derived from typical usages of the gr® ^
French Master, eventually become stabilised
new footing and with a new meaning in
ferent context."
The part played by their depth of historical percep^
tion in establishing these transformed meaning use
be seen even in quite small works, such as t e
at Rothrist completed in 1958. The exterior vvl . atTl p
plank shuttered exposed concrete, its cu t
gargoyles and random windows, its roof <9
down from the upper works of the parliament n
at Chandigarh - all this is ‘brut Corbu’ of the f,ft ’
but in its sections the house belongs to ® n ° _
epoch entirely. As a habitable volume it is e ec
ly a box on stilts, a solution virtually abandonee y
the master after the war. Within that volume 1
fers the ‘studio-house section’ double heig , !*Vr h
room with a balcony across the back and, a ° .
versions of that section were used by Le Cor u
in most of the ‘Unites’, it appears here in so -
thing more like the format, scale and domes
function for which it was first devised in the ear y
twenties. At the other end of the block is a s ® n
room on the second floor, recessed back from the
visible frame at that point and overlooking a pro¬
jecting terrace with stair to ground level — a clear
restatement of the ‘terrasses’ which gave the name
31 ‘Architectural Design’, February 1963
33 ‘Casabella’ no. 258, 1961
90
to the villa Stein at Garches of 1926-28; though,
clipped to the side of a long narrow block such as
this, it also recalls slightly earlier projects which
survive only in the pages of the ‘Oeuvre complete’.
Similar restatements, similar transformations, occur
throughout their work of the period, though their
formalism is kept within bounds, partly by their re¬
spect for their ‘best source’ and partly by a certain
sense of architectural decencies that prevents them
ever mistaking architecture for sculpture as Walter
Forderer, Rolf Otto and Hans Zwimpfer did in their
over-wrought display of ‘de Stijl’ mannerisms in the
school at Aesch which is sometimes mistakenly com¬
pared with Atelier 5’s work, simply because of its
‘brut’ concrete. Atelier 5 avoid such extremism, they
prefer to simplify, as in the way they reduce the
variable idiom of Le Corbusier’s factory at St Die
to the much simpler language of their own factory at
Thun. Many of the details (such as the brise-soleil)
are virtually identical; the difference in total effect
illustrates as clearly as anything in Modern Archi¬
tecture could, the difference between an intelligent
follower and an original creator. Atelier 5’s factory
reassuringly demonstrates the coherence that comes
from consistency, a faultless exercise within the
limits of a given style; Le Corbusier’s startlingly
affirms that coherence can also come from the
disturbing inconsistencies that arise from the exer¬
cise of a major creative talent.
91
‘ M*l!;
W
mmmmm v .^
1 10 —113
^ Corbusier; La Sainte-Baume
pouches du Rhone, France),
"grimage Centre (La Cite Permanente),
first -—= • — -
Project. 1948
. -J'.vi. I ytto
no/m
^ an ’ er| d elevation, the central part of
the facade
^2/ li 3
Pi
orspectivo. plans, and section
s cale 1:500) of a typical apartment
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93
120/121
Le Corbusier; Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris, France),
'Petite Maison de Weekend'. 1935
Interior and plan (scale 1:200)
117-119
Le Corbusier; Lake Constance (Switzerland),
Fueter House project. 1950
South elevation, plan, and section (scale 1:200)
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98
135
View from entrance ramp
99
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140-148
James Stirling and James Gowan; Ham Common (London, England),
Langham House Development. 1958
140
Site plan
142 (right)
Garden elevation of three-storey block
102
if entrance
143
First-floor bridge in two-storey
144
Elevation of two-storey block
room
149-152
John Voelcker; Arkley (Hertfordshire,
England), Lyttleton House. 1956
149/150
Entrance front, living-room block
151 / 152
Plan and section through courtyard
(scale 1:200)
1 courtyard
2 entrance
3 toilet
4 living room
5 music room
6 dining area
7 kitchen
8 playroom
9 bedroom
10 bathroom
153- 158
William G Howell, Gillian Howell and Stanley Amis;
Hampstead (London, England), Terrace Housing. 1956
153
Balcony over living room and kitchen area
154- 157
Plans at second, first, ground floor and basement levels
(scale 1:500) 13 convector heater
1 storage 14 stairs down
2 coal 15 coal delivery hole
3 toilet 16 grating over open area
4 utility room 17 entrance porch
5 boiler 18 study
6 studio 19 garage
7 kitchen 20 conservatory
8 living room 21 sitting room
9 spare room 22 void over living room
10 bathroom 23 bedroom
11 open area 24 dining / kitchen
12 cycle and dustbin store 25 water tanks
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169/170
Sir Basil Spence and Partners; Brighton (England)
University of Sussex. 1962/63
First courtyard, entrance passage
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Peter Moro; London (England)
Hille Furniture Shop. 1963
Display area
172
Denys Lasdun and Partners;
London (England),
Flats in St James’s Place. 1961
Garden wall of penthouse
\ \ V )• I
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k
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blijLLL
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Gable walls of slab blocks
176
Close up of pilotis and space under a slab block
177
Social service building under slab block
L..
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176
Close up of pilotis and space under a slab block
177
Social service building under slab block
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178/179
Detail of stairway-passage and end staircase of block of shops
180-182
Bresciani, Valdes, Castillo and Huidobro;
Quinta Normal Housing. 1961-63
External staircase, gable wall of six-storey
row-housing
block two storey
EH FTrr '
titt - rn
lumu mil 1 — -U
120
r
185/186
Atelier 5 (Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber,
Rolf Hesterberg, Hans Hostettler,
Niklaus Morgenthaler, Alfredo Pini);
Rothrist (Switzerland), Alder House. 1958
Rear elevation, terrace side
121
SjX * '' *' 4
i
Le Corbusier; St Die (France), Factory. 1950
Brise-soleil
Rolf Hesterberg,
, Alfredo Pini);
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191/192
Walter Forderer,
School. 1962
Entrance stenc i
impfer; Aesch (Switzerland)
124
7 Hard cases: the Brick Brutalists
Around the succession of buildings which belong to
the main stream of Brutalist development, critics
have grouped others which, for the purposes of ar¬
gument, might be regarded as Brutalist, or might
not. It is difficult, to know where to place Sverre
Fehn and Geir Grung’s museum'at Maihaugen in
Norway. Both men are members of that network of
British connections with Norway which is sometimes
humorously called the ‘Arctic Circle', and Grung,
like Norway’s senior member of Cl AM, Arne Korsmo,
was present at the Otterlo congress in 1959. The
museum might well be regarded as an attempt to
find an ideal solution for a difficult site, and it sports
a certain amount of ‘brut’ concrete on its exposed
roof-slabs. But in a world of architecture as small
as that in Norway, every major building is so much
of an unique occasion that it is dangerous to try to
link it to any particular movement.
Many of these hard cases are churches - obviously
a confluence between a puritan aesthetic and a
puritan ethic might be looked for in the Protestant
connection, but not all the likely candiates have a
Lutheran or Calvinist background. Figini and Pollini’s
Santa Maria dei Poveri in Milan prompted Kidder
Smith to observe that its exterior “suggests more a
warehouse than a church” and he described the in¬
terior as ‘near-brutal’ but there is a good deal of
justice in his proposition that this is in the estab¬
lished tradition (compare the present state of many
Renaissance churches) of not bothering with finishes
and cladding once the shell of the church was
weathertight. In the Protestant connection, however,
a lack of obvious ‘finish’ is more likely to be delib¬
erate. The bare concrete block-work and precast
beams of van den Broeck and Bakema s church at
Nagele in Holland seems to represent the same
ethic and aesthetic as is seen in the bare white¬
washed interiors of other temples of the Hervormd
Kerk’; the shelter wall that wraps around the adjoin¬
ing courtyard is an attempt to create the necessary
shelter required for ‘that particular place (a bleak,
newly-reclaimed polder).
But the hardest case, certainly the most enigmatic,
is Sigurd Lewerentz’s Markuskyrka outside Stock¬
holm. It is a building that would greatly enrich the
Brutalist canon if it could safely be included within
it, but how convincing could such a classification be
made? It is not the revolutionary outburst of a dis¬
sident young architect, nor is it a work of opportun¬
ism on the part of a middle-aged and successful
architect adapting to a change of fashion. Lewerentz
is of an age with Le Corbusier (he was born in 1885)
and the church seems to be the unexpected product
of a long process of architectural maturity. It com¬
bines shallow vaulting, plane and curved walls — all
in resolutely coarse brickwork that makes Jaoul
look rather inhibited — with a concept of plan, space
and geometry that has nothing in common with any
of the Brutalist buildings that use brick in any relat¬
ed manner. In some ways this is very ‘other’ archi¬
tecture: Lewerentz’s command of architectural form
is secure and explicit, and yet the building has a
genuine informality, a relaxed indifference to such
concepts as ‘rectangle’ that goes far beyond the
forms of, say, the Smithson Sheffield scheme. How¬
ever casual the grouping of the buildings in that
project may have been, the individual parts still
answer to a few regular geometrical archetypes,
whereas the plan of the Markuskyrka is studiedly
irresolute about such archetypes, especially at the
altar end, where the walls vary in thickness and curve
away in various directions — echoing the formal in¬
difference of those mediaeval castle builders whom
Louis Kahn so much admires but shows no desire
to imitate. When one observes how this ‘other’ archi¬
tecture is the work of a man firmly grounded in the
Scandinavian traditions of neo-Classical order and
picturesque sensibility, one cannot help wondering
if Hans Asplund, in coining the term ‘Neo-Brutalist’,
was not identifying a trend that might have emerg¬
ed anyhow, without any assistance at all from Le
Corbusier, Louis Kahn or the British.
But, in the end, the Markuskyrka remains an enigma;
it poses a question but illuminates no possible
answer, least of all about the other Brick Brutalists.
This sub-category or marginal grouping of doubtful
Brutalists, to which Stirling and Gowan might be
taken to belong at the time of Ham Common, is not
perhaps to be taken too seriously, especially since
the use of brick is not the main factor they have in
common, merely the most obvious. As between Ham
Common, Oswald Mathias Ungers’s house in Co¬
logne, and the extension to the architecture school
at Cambridge University, there is no agreement as
to external form, detailing or spatial aesthetics. What
they have in common is great erudition and sophis¬
tication, worn with a flourish, about the recent his¬
tory of Modern Architecture.
With Ungers, his sophisticated awareness seems at
times more like an inflamed sensibility. It spills out
of him in conversation, it gives him a response to
modern masterpieces that can be personal and vio¬
lent, yet his part in the organisation of the ‘Glaserne
Kette’ exhibition in 1963 shows that it can be put to
disciplined and scholarly ends. His house is a ma¬
nifesto-building, and although it could have been
built at no other time than the late fifties (the en¬
closed garden courts in particular seem to belong to
that time) it evokes remarkable echoes of the archi¬
tecture of thirty years before. For a start, its loca¬
tion, at the end of a street and attached to a house
in an earlier style, recalls the siting of Rietveld s
Schroder house in Utrecht, though its detailed archi¬
tectural idiom has less connection with de Stijlthan
with more cautious Dutch derivatives from the work
of Frank Lloyd Wright. In any case, its main affinities
tie it more directly to Germany, to Erich Mendel¬
sohn’s early houses in Berlin (eg the Stern house),
to Hugo Haring's farm at Garkau, and even, in the
way the garden structures relate the main mass of
the house to the street, to some of the terracing
around the houses of the Weissenhofsiedlung. It is
very striking that in a generation that was well aware
of the innovations offered by Haring at Garkau (it
_____ one of the Smithsons’ favourite ‘images') Un-
gers should be the only Brutalist of any sort to make
any kind of architectural reference to that much-
admired source.
For reasons such as these, Ungers’s house is per¬
haps the only building of quality in Northern Europe
that can be compared to the work of the Neoliber-
tarians in Italy, though any such comparison would
certainly go in Ungers’s favour, since his erudition
is far better digested, far more apt to the type of
building he had to design, and far less restricting to
his imagination. Even so, it is still far more directly
involved with historical interests than is the com¬
parable work of the English Brick Brutalists, even
erudite members of the ‘Cambridge School’ who re¬
present the extreme intellectual wing of the move¬
ment in England.
Nevertheless, the Cambridge movement begins
with a manifesto building almost contemporary with
Ungers’s house. The extension to the school of archi¬
tecture was designed by Alex Hardy and Colin A
St J Wilson (the same Sandy Wilson mentioned in
1.2) in 1957-58, and into this relatively small building
were poured most of the intellectual aspirations of
the Wilson, Smithson generation; it is one of the
most eclectic designs ever to be packed into an
anonymous-looking brick box.
Yet even the exterior of that box betrays some of
the intellectual concerns that run through the whole
design, for the heights of the two storeys, as re¬
vealed by the exposed concrete edges of the floor
and roof-slabs, are related by the Golden Section
ratio (which underlies the ‘Modulor’, of course) and
a consistent proportional obsession runs through
the relations of the windows to one another and to
the facades on the exterior, and penetrates the re¬
lationships of even the smallest designed details of
the interior. Many of these internal details give
instant information about the interests and pre¬
dilections of the architects. Thus the elevated ‘pulpit’
which carries the projector for the slides used in
lectures, recalls in its bulk form the Elementarist
sculpture of a Malevitsch or a Vantongerloo; but it
carries a concrete shelf recalling the forms of the
brise-soleils of the Secretariat in Chandigarh, and
is reached by a tubular ladder in the manner of the
Machine Aesthetic of the twenties. But the game of
intellectual cross-references also embraces the less
obvious machine aesthetics of the 1950's, and the
lecturer at the reading desk finds himself confronted
with a battery of controls with which to adjust the
natural and artificial lighting and communicate with
the projectionist.
Yet, intellectual sports aside, this is a fundamentally
simple and workmanlike building containing reason¬
able and necessary accommodation for the teaching
of architecture — lecture and criticism rooms on the
upper floor, tuition rooms and a crypt-like common-
room on the floor below. Its means of architectural
expression are few — brick, concrete and wood —
but they completely dominate the visual aesthetic,
and the architects were at some pains to ensure that
they did so, with the result that the walls are uncom-
126
gib > s
monly thick ( 13 V 2 inches) for the sake of rer1 t-
to offer the right kind of effect of br\q^ e ' banC l|ed
es’ on both sides. All these elements qqS th at
with a didactic fervour and moral 0 j aS Tayl° r
strike a familiar Brutalist note; as ^
says in ‘Cambridge New Architecture • naC curacie s
“Paint and plaster which normally cover 1 ^ e ven'
and birthmarks of building are exc u e ’ are left
the bolt-holes for the stairway shutter
exposed”, aesthetic of ma-
or, in other words, the ethic ana c oncentra-
terials ‘as found’. Perhaps because enC y could
tion of intellectual effort and didactic: u idiom
not be repeated, later buildings in lS £ cbo ol does
are less successful, and the Cambri 9 e ^.j Harvey
not really strike its best form again Q a j US Col-
Court, a residential hostel for studen s ^ Patrick
lege, Cambridge. Designed by Wi ^°^ e | a g e of Sir
Hodgkinson, and under the genera proposition
Leslie Martin, it makes a very diffe re " | an jt con-
to the Architecture School extension. ^ j a square
sists of four ranges of student rooms ar ^ section,
court, in the English collegiate tra 1 j n that the
however, it departs from that tra 1 10 terraces
rooms are stepped back floor by f ° or ^ the south
in front; also, the short range of ro ^ r V S g jt s back to
side is turned to face outward an a ^ e court is
the court. Another departure is t a ^ bove ground
raised the equivalent of one storey ^ bar un der
level, and has service rooms and a sna truncated
it, lit by a large skylight in the f° r ™ cQ urt. The
pyramid which rises off-centre m position
level, and has service rooms and a sna truncated
it, lit by a large skylight in the forI ^ e GO urt. The
pyramid which rises off-centre in position
whole concept thus adopts an equiv sjty arc hj-
vis-a-vis the ‘status quo’ in Bntis n of ur ban
tecture, accepting a mediaeval r ban garden
planning of doubtful validity for a .. jt in the
site in the twentieth century, only 0 living-
interests of other concepts of com ™Tcanon derives
Its claim to inclusion in the Bruta ■ chosen ma _
partly from its obsessive interest i vjeW| tQ be
terial, for it appears, from some po. t though
a most carved from a solid mas cra ftsmanly
close examination reveals some y .
brick details (as if the architects a M!eg v
fresher course in detailing from sue e houses'*
der Rohe buildings as the Wolf and La " g f **
But even more, its claim to inclusion sterns from its
planning concept, related to the Sm « p | ace ,
in ancient sites. It aims to create a ai oraus ^ +u^
and has the air of a sacred ^'^^erraced back,
they 0 do not enXse the central c0 %\!° s ™ u tjf 0 * S
form an amphitheatre around it. From e «. . . ®
reaches the court by mounting a broa 0
ceremonial steps (as if to the terraces a en-
Itza, for example) and is then confron e , e
altar-skylight in a raised court that does n er
one from the elements so much as offer o he
sky. It is a strange, moving and quite un ng ish
place, having no relationship with anyt m 9 e in
Cambridge, not even the quasi-Brutal bui ings of
i •< q6 4
33 Nicholas Taylor, ‘Cambridge New Architecture ,
For illustrations see page 153—163
Churchill College, not even with the small residen
tial cluster that forms the first, and better, part of
the Churchill development. It is doubtful if Harvev
Court, in the end, relates to anything and - as has
been said - its relationship to Brutalism is arguable
especially as the architects were not consciouslj
committed to Brutalism as a deliberate programme
It is doubtful, of course, if any architect other than
the Smithsons was so committed — with the bafflino
exception, to which we should now turn, of Vit-
toriano Vigano in Milan.
8.1 Istituto Marchiondi, Milan
Vigano’s Istituto Marchiondi was one of the major
surprises of European architecture in the late fifties.
At a time when most Italian architects seemed to be
sinking into comfortable compromise with the poli¬
tico/clerical regime, into submission to the specu¬
lators who had ‘le mani sulla citta’, and thus control¬
led the progress of building, Vigand produced this
‘habitat’ for an organisation whose programme of
psychological rehabilitation was outside the normal
church-controlled pattern of charity; at a time when
the acceptance of compromise was being expres¬
sed in the sentimental formalism of Neoliberty, he
offered a tough-minded and unsentimental building
(which has gravely offended tender-minded senti¬
mentalists from all over the world); and at a time
when great historical casuistry was being exercised
to justify Neoliberty’s betrayal of the promise of the
Italian Rationalist movement, Vigand peremptorily
condemned them all by employing an architectural
idiom that recalled the fervour and discipline of the
pre-war ‘architettura razionalista’.
This point about the building’s parentage is impor¬
tant, because it lends substance to its claim to be
Brutalist, but most foreign critics have overlooked
it, and even Renato Pedio, in his presentation of the
Istituto Marchiondi in ‘L’Architettura’ 34 , keeps the
historical references unspecific and generalised:
^ “Brutalism, according to the English critic Reyner
Banham, signifies, in architecture:
1 the building as an unified visual image, clear and
memorable,
2 clear exhibition of its structure,
3 a high valuation of raw, untreated materials
; This alternative definition is adduced from ‘L’Espres-
so’, 2 March 1958: clean virgin surfaces; heavily cor¬
rugated volumes, but of prismatic simplicity; services
exposed to view: zones of violent colour. Brutalism
is thus a taste for self-sufficient architectonic ob¬
jects, aggressively placed in their surroundings; it is
an energetic affirmation of the structure, the revenge
of mass and plasticity over the aesthetics of match¬
boxes and cardboard; it aims to profit (on the basis
of historical study but outside academic categories)
from the lessons of Modern Architecture stripped of
all literary excuses. It is a method of working, cer¬
tainly not a recipe for poesy. And if, on the one hand
its polemical power now seems reduced (especially
outside its native England) its strong moral basis, on
the other hand, distils the most significant essence
from the now long history of Modern Architecture.
This moral chastity, these rigorous standards of
conduct in face of the world; this courage and re¬
volutionary spirit, could lead back to a truer sense
of the relation between architecture and society,
currently obscured by nostalgic revivalism.
Though Pedio, making a polemical defence, names
no historical sources, trend-spotters have always
127
34 ‘L’Architettura’, February 1959
regarded the building as fair game, and have usually
classed it with attempts to revive the architecture of
‘de StijP. Thus Nikolaus Pevsner in his famous lec¬
ture on Neo-Historicism 35 , after discussing the re¬
vival of ‘de StijP in funiture design, went on to say:
“In architecture, neo-de-Stijl is, I think, just as strik¬
ing. Illustration 19 is a building at Harlem by the
Dutch architect J. W. E. Buys, and illustration 20
shows not another view of the same building but the
Marchiondi Institute in Milan, by Vittoriano Vigano
of 1957.”
But this was not how Vigano saw the situation; he
admitted, even claimed influence from Giuseppe
Terragni above all others, and the buildings abound
in details, especially window-details, that recall Ter¬
ragni fairly directly. Beyond this, the manner in which
the main forms and exposed structure of the build¬
ings transcend the expressive language of the Ra¬
tionalist movement, has less to do with ‘de StijP
than with the manifest spatial ambitions revealed by
Terragni’s preoccupation with exposed frames, open
stairs and bridges penetrating volumes from side to
side. It is as if Vigand were going forward from
where Terragni left off, while those of Terragni’s ge¬
neration who survived were going backwards from
that point. If one were to extrapolate Terragni’s ar¬
chitecture forward from his last pre-war projects
into a post-war situation that contained the Jaoul
houses and the work of Kenzo Tange, one might
well produce something like Marchiondi.
Yet one may suspect that what Vigano really sought
from Terragni and the history of the Rationalist
movement was less a formal aesthetic than a func¬
tional ethic. If, in 1956, one were to set out to design
a school in Italy there were very few native examples
for study that were not an affront to human dignity
and the decent aspirations of pedagogy, and of
those few, two were of outstanding interest — the
tuberculosis colony at Legnano by BBPR, Gianluigi
Banfi, Lodovico B. Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, Er¬
nesto N. Rogers (1938) and Terragni’s Asilo Sant'
Elia in Como, completed a year earlier. The Asilo
could have contributed formal usages (such as
frames standing clear of the volumes they support)
but more than that it would suggest a severe and
calm educational ambience, and this would be re¬
inforced by the example of Legnano, which stood,
in some ways, closer to Vigand’s own problem of a
curative institute.
Functionally, the Istituto Marchiondi is a residential
rehabilitative school for psychologically disturbed
boys, run on firm and progressive lines, and former¬
ly accommodated in unsuitable and run-down pre¬
mises in Central Milan. There has been much specu¬
lation about the motives behind the severe aesthetic
of Vigand s design, which in many detailed ways re¬
sembles Hunstanton redone with a concrete frame,
even though the bulk form is more complex; how far
35 Reprinted in 'Journal of the Royal Institute of British Archi¬
tects', April 1961
does it derive from the psychiatric programme?
There were many at one time who, observing its
differences from Vigano’s other works, dismissed it
as ‘a mere styling job’, architecto-psychiatric fancy-
dress. This was a plausible enough argument to put
forward around 1960 when Milan was the world
centre for facile fashion-mongering, but a second
visit and mature reflection will not support the idea.
The building convinces, and is all of a piece; and
this is the more remarkable in view of some of the
very extreme devices employed by Vigano. For in¬
stance, each dormitory-room is crossed by a typical
brutalist pedestrian bridge half way up, connecting
the lavatory, which is also at the higher level, to a
balcony containing clothes cupboards at the other
end of the dormitory — the cupboards being double¬
sided, with staff access to the far side from a
corridor not normally used by the boys. By this
desperate-seeming shift, Vigano is able to offer the
legally required minimum volume per boy without
making the floor area of the room ridiculously and
inhumanly large, and then exploit the double height
to give boys and staff separate access to the cup¬
boards. Doubtless there would be simpler methods
of achieving these results, but there seem to be no
particular functional or structural advantages that
would result, and there may be some psychiatric
advantages in making a trip to the lavatory or cup¬
boards something of a public ceremony, if the dormi¬
tory is not directly supervised by one of the staff.
In any case, this device has the conviction of ex¬
tremism that informs the rest of the design. Even if
Vigano and his clients consciously decided on Bru-
talism as the only style (they seem rather to have
achieved this decision by mutual persuasion and
analysis of their problem) it clearly was not out of
merely fashionable preference. It is part of the real
presence of the building — handsome in sunlight,
intimidating in bad weather — and emphasises that
‘moral chastity’ of which Pedio had written. On this
score of a sternly moral building as part of a re¬
formative educational programme, it is interesting to
compare Marchiondi with Aldo van Eyck’s orphanage-
school in Amsterdam. Here is a building designed by
an architect in far closer touch with the Smithsons
and the origins of Brutalism than Viganb was, and
working with a repertoire of materials that — as cat¬
alogued in purely verbal description — sounds the
same as Vigano’s: concrete, brick, wood, glass.
Some of the interior spaces, such as the common
room at the Istituto Marchiondi and the play-room
for very small children at the orphanage, even look
rather alike in photographs. But the effect is very
different in reality: Marchiondi is stern, but the
orphanage is very gentle, the final disproof that ex¬
posed brick and concrete are ‘inhuman’. Vigand’s
building, therefore, is the more Brutalist in the com¬
mon usage of the term, the purely aesthetic, but in
terms of the ‘ethic’ of Brutalism, the two schools are
on an even footing, both serious attempts at the
right human environment, or habitat, for a particu¬
lar human situation in place and time. What one can¬
not be certain about, however, is how Vigand him-
128
self would have regarded this comparison of the two
buildings in 1958 or 59. He had, after all, just per¬
formed the unique feat of consciously joining the
Brutalist movement, and the feeling emerges from
conversation with him, that he was joining a tough,
stern movement. And those who insist that Brutalism
is an affair of exposed concrete, rough brickwork
and a deliberate disregard for the traditional graces
of Modern Architecture would probably agree with
him, and regard Marchiondi as the harbinger of the
high period of concrete Brutalism: a harvest-season
exemplified in three notable habitats completed at
this time or a little later, one in Switzerland, one in
Japan, and one in Britain.
123/124
BBPR (Gianluigi Banfi, Lodovico B. Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti,
Ernesto N. Rogers); Legnano (Italy), Sanatorium. 1937
The sun-porch and a general view
125
Giuseppe Terragni; Como (Italy), Asilo Sant'Elia. 1937
129
For illustrations see page 164—188
8.2 Habitats: Halen, Harumi, Sheffield
The preoccupation with habitat, the total built envi¬
ronment that shelters man and directs his move¬
ments, is a continuing theme that connects together
many diverse Brutalist buildings, and connects Bru-
talism with other progressive thinking (and action)
outside the field of architecture. This preoccupa¬
tion with the ‘dwelling of Man’ arose, in the post¬
war years, from a real sense of social need — a
need for dwellings, a need for better dwelling-
habitat than society was, in fact, providing. But it
remains true that Brutalist practice in habitat has
never even tried to deal with the ‘total’ environment,
the practice has been dominated by purely visual
images, purely spatial concepts. Weak on the me¬
chanical and communicative services needed for a
fully effective habitat, Brutalism as a movement con¬
centrated on the domestication of a few basic re¬
sidential and social concepts derived from Le Cor¬
busier, and from that mythology of a ‘Mediterranean
way of life’ that had grown up under his influence,
and under the influence of such modern Italian
habitats as Quaroni’s work at La Martella. Thus, the
work of Paul Rudolph that most persistently receives
tVie epithet ‘Brutalist’, is not his Art and Architecture
Building at Yale with its artfully coarse concrete
surfaces, but his married-student housing for the
I same university, of which he himself wrote 36 :
“It should look like a village, not like housing ...
though parts are repeated, they don’t look it. Tradi¬
tional housing has used repeated housing units, but
it doesn’t bore. We too must repeat but not bore.
Spaces in between the units are important... court¬
yards and terraces, paths and entrances.”
In the choice of image: ‘like a village’ (in its built
form, specifically a mountain village), and its con¬
cern with public spaces: “courtyards and terraces,
paths and entrances”, this habitat reveals all too
clearly its origins, as does the implied ambition to
create a literally built-in sense of community. But
narrow and restricted as the range of basic con¬
cepts may be, it remains a bitter truth that the world
at large was not building better habitats, more con¬
vincing communities, than Le Corbusier had envi¬
saged, and it remains the chief glory of the younger,
or more brutal, Brutalists that they occasionally con¬
trived to surpass the Corbusian standard or propose
significant variations upon it. The three major sche¬
mes which are discussed here are therefore ranked
in order of their degree of departure from Corbusian
prototypes, rather than in chronological sequence,
though they are so nearly contemporary that the se¬
quence is not important.
Siedlung Halen by Atelier 5, standing on a wooded
rise outside Berne, was effectively completed in
1960—61. Its direct dependence on the work of Le
Corbusier has never been in doubt: “... the plan is
just one step away from the Permanent City of the
34 'Architectural Record', March 1961
Sainte-Baume project”, (Neave Brown) and t * | a y
step was toward the same primitive archetype**
behind Paul Rudolph’s housing, for Neave
also described Halen as “... orderly and comp®
an Italian hill town, complete with piazza an
panile-chimney to suggest social identity”. Bu
more historically precise, the step away f f ° ^ e
Sainte-Baume brings Atelier 5 rather closer
‘Roq et Rob’ project of 1949. What was evi
ly the most beguiling aspect of ‘Roq e
duly reappears at Halen, as in so many
er schemes — the stepped path splitti n 9
whole terraced composition from top to bottom^^
passing through a central public space; so too
the idea of composing those terraces out o
deep-plan, narrow-section apartments with tn tQ
commodation on more than one level, accor
the fall of the land. ^ aC j
Le Corbusier’s original vision of such a habits
been deeply imbued with post-war concerns, ^
social reform, the simple life, spiritual regener g .^_
and so forth, and was seen by him as a coarse ^ s 0 f
pie architecture of vaulted roofs carried on en t
rammed earth. Halen, built for comfortably at ^
bourgeois suburbanites (who leave their cars u ^ jan
the end of the terraces, and maintain a ‘P ede jf aS a
image’ while within the habitat) inevitably n gem _
more sophisticated aesthetic, derived and as
bled by Atelier 5 with their usual cunning fr ° of
numerable different Corbusian sources, sonr1 ®, at
them - such as the brise-soleils from the 'Urn of
Marseilles - seemingly quite out of key, and °
scale with the village image of the plan and s ® tjon ‘
However, subsequent overgrowth by vegeta_ ree J
especially grass on the roofs, has largely r eS ° g at
the primitivistic, Sainte-Baume image. What w ® gs
first a rather self-assertively clever architects ^
been reduced by the obliterative power of na
to the status of a simple habitat, an indifferen ^
side village, the mid-twentieth century equivalen
the garden suburb that was the image of P rogr
sive habitat in 1900.
Kunio Mayekawa’s Harumi apartment block in >
is unlikely ever to disappear behind encroaching
vegetation. It is too big, and its unlovely site se ®.7 1 *
to have been permanently stripped of natural hte-
its raw concrete will always stare bluntly out at the
world. Its date, 1958, still seemsto startle Europeans,
who tend to regard Kenzo Tange’s Kurashiki town
hall, which is four years younger, as the fi rst rea
exercise in ‘gros beton arm6’ in Japan. It is worth
remembering therefore, that Maekawa was at one
time Tange’s master, and represents a direct link
between Japan and Le Corbusier that may eventu¬
ally prove more significant than the better-known
connection through Junzo Sakakura. In terms of
strict chronology, the design and construction of
Harumi occupied a period in the history of Japanese
architecture that was rich in generically Brutalist ex¬
periments - Kikutake’s graceless Tonogaya ppart-
ment-development, for instance, or that curious va¬
riation upon the ‘Roq et Rob’ format, the Fuji Juko
Omiya development by Ikuta, Oki and Miyajim 3 -
130
in ini» -a ■ Diock looks less start¬
ling, but it is no less of an innovation, technically
aesthetically and as a proposition for a habitat On
this last point, Harumi may not appear much of
departure rom the norm of a large, isolated slab
block, but there are two observations which should
be made in this connection. Firstly, that the access
galleries at every third floor of the block effectively
function as a series of linked courtyards between
one structural pier and the next, since each receives
the entrances of a number of flats, those not at deck
level being reached by stairs. The decision to em¬
ploy an external street deck was apparently taken
as a direct choice against Le Corbusier’s ‘rue int6-
rieure’ concept, but even more significant is the at¬
titude toward their function in the total habitat as
expressed by Noboru Kawazoe 37 :
“It seems to me however, that drying diapers are a
sign of life and energy, and if the building becomes
nondescript when adorned with them, then the build¬
ing is at fault. An apartment house should be able
to withstand these manifestations of human life. If
it cannot, it is a weak building ...”
and a few paragraphs later, speaking specifically of
Harumi’s ‘streets suspended in the air’ he goes on
to observe:
“Here children can play games, or ride tricycles as
they might do on the side-walk in other areas. Here
too the petty hoodlums of the surrounding districts
can prowl at night, to the disconsolence of the in¬
habitants ... a building does not really belong to
the people unless it is capable of absorbing the
shadier sides of life along with the more pleasant.
To be a true building it must melt into the history
of its time.”
This must be about the most permissive statement
about the use of habitat ever made by a member
of the Brutalist connection. It is doubtful if any
European, let alone any architect brought up in the
‘preventive’ morality of British social reform, could
tolerate even petty crime as part of the ‘realities of
the situation’.
But — and this is the second point — the permissive
attitude toward the public spaces is matched by a
related attitude to what goes on internally. Within
the bare bookshelf of the concrete frame, Mayekawa
inserts what are virtually Japanese houses of the tra¬
ditional type, to quote Kawazoe again:
“The larger apartments of the Harumi building re¬
semble traditional city houses in plan, while the
smaller ones have the farm-house plan ... people
used the (traditional standardised) houses accord¬
ing to their individual needs and were not troubled
by the sameness. The fact is that people are the
masters of architecture, and architecture must pro¬
vide them the necessary freedom.”
37 ‘Japan Architect’, March 1959
The closing observation is, in fact, Kawazoe quoting
Tange, though the sentiment recalls what the
Smithsons had said about leaving man room to
adapt his own habitat (see section 4.3). Yet no
Smithson scheme, no ‘Unite’ by Le Corbusier, nei¬
ther Halen nor Park Hill, Sheffield, is so permissive
as to offer its inhabitants their accustomed domestic
environment all over again. For Harumi does not
merely reproduce the traditional spaces and di¬
mensions; as far as possible it works with traditio¬
nal ‘tatami’ mats in the living areas, the customary
planked flooring in kitchen, bathroom etc, sliding
screens, sliding cupboard-doors, even a sort of
‘tokonoma’-alcove in the living room. It is, so to
speak, the Smithsons’ concept of the “necessity for
the traditional backyard”, brought indoors.
And what is so striking about Harumi, is that this
mQdel exposition of an original Brutalist ethic is
realized in an original version of the Brutalist aes¬
thetic that any European Brutalist would have been
happy to have conceived.
“Mayekawa and associates have made a concrete
building which expresses the material even more
positively than Le Corbusier, yet have (sic) a preci¬
sion and finesse reminiscent of Perret.” 38
This last observation seems arguable, suffice it to
say that the concrete is massive, ‘brut’ and handled
in heroic style. The services that make the building
work are carried with an equally Brutalist swagger,
not only in the sense that a large tank and asso¬
ciated pipe-works are exhibited on the roof with¬
out being clothed in some fanciful structure of the
sort that a Corbusian aesthetic commonly enjoins,
but also that a massive duct-floor-cum-structural-
beam runs visibly through the block from end to
end at every alternate third floor to that occupied
by a street deck. That such a structure, embracing
such a conception of habitat should be created at
that time, on the opposite side of the world to that
in which two young architects from the English prov¬
inces had first enunciated the Brutalist creed,
showed how far that creed expressed an architec¬
tural mood of the time, and it was to the work of
two other young architects in the English provinces
that one has to turn to find a conception that is in
any way comparable with Harumi.
Park Hill, Sheffield, was effectively designed by
Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, under the direction of
J. L. Womersley, the city architect, and it sums up al¬
most as many of the sociological intentions of the
younger architects as the Cambridge Architecture
School extension does of their intellectual interests.
It is a huge single complex building occupying and
partly enclosing a recognisable district of the city *—
a genuinely satisfying achievement in a generation
that had big ambitions and had been forced by cir¬
cumstances to realise them in penny packets. But
this vast enterprise is unified and kept humanly com¬
prehensible by a habitat-device that was dear to the
131
3 * 'Architectural Design', May 1959
ideal of built-in community-sense of that genera¬
tion — a street-deck system even more sophisticated
and mature than Mayekawa’s. Four, twelve-foot-wide
pedestrian promenades thread through whole com¬
plex joining its various extremities; on the upper¬
most it is possible to walk for ten minutes without
retracing one’s steps.
In order to give the greatest number of apartments
the best orientation for light and view, the block
divides threfe times, each of its limbs looping back
on itself. The street-decks, keeping always to the
shaded side of the block therefore have frequently
to penetrate to the other side of the limbs where
they bend, thus creating the equivalent of street-
corners. At the end of each limb, the deck opens out
into a small piazza served by lifts and stairs for ver¬
tical circulation. At the three points where the block
divides, however, a bridge leaps across from the
piazza and connects with the two branches of the
street-deck beyond the gap, creating another small
public space in front of the service-lift on that side
also. It is at these points where three different ca¬
tegories of vertical circulation meet the horizontal
circulation provided by the street-decks, here na¬
kedly revealed as pedestrian bridges, that the es¬
sence of Park Hill is seen.
This essential pattern of circulation stems, as at
Harumi, from a conviction that the ‘rue interieure’ of
Le Corbusier’s ‘Unites’ would not serve. The street
deck emerged as a logical corrective, and at the
same time posed the problem of how people should
circulate through their habitat, how far circulation-
spaces were part of the vital environment of the
habitat. At Siedlung Halen the stepped path passes
through the central square; at Harumi the circulation
is a series of minute public places, but at Sheffield
the circulation space generates a variety of public
areas, on the precept of the Smithsons’ Golden
Lane competition entry as well as Lynn and Smith’s
own:
The Smithsons’ Golden Lane project used a simi¬
lar street-access to ours, and made the first moves
towards their continuity by creating street-corner
junctions where refuse chutes would be located,
which they likened to the modern equivalent of the
village pump.” 39
Like the suspended streets of Harumi, Park Hill’s
street decks occur at every third floor, and onto the
decks open the front doors of all the apartments.
Along the deck itself pass small trucks for deliveries,
mail and furniture-removals, but no faster wheeled
traffic to menace the playing children or gossiping
adults — or, indeed the turbulent teenagers who oc-
cassionally disturb the peace, for Park Hill, like
Harumi, has melted into the history of its times and
absorbed something of the shadier side. But the
apartments that are served by the street decks are
less permissive, do not reconstruct the previous
39 Quoted in the 'Journal of the Royal Institute of British Archi¬
tects’, December 1962
domestic scene, and call upon the new inhabitants
to adopt a new environment.
There were, in fact, fairly cogent sociological and
even criminological reasons for breaking up the
existing living-patterns of the area, which had be¬
come a notoriously blighted slum. This, indeed, was
the reason for rebuilding it, and this air of social
urgency was one of the reasons why Jack Lynn and
Ivor Smith volunteered to design for this difficult
site rather than an easier one elsewhere in the city.
Thus, if Park Hill can in any way be regarded as an
ideal solution for this particular place at that parti¬
cular time, the ideal is that of the English concep¬
tion of social justice, as expressed through the
English system of local government.
But it differs from Halen or Harumi in more ways
than this; the aesthetic is as different as the ethic.
Very little indeed of the external detailing makes
even token acknowledgement to Le Corbusier, to
any other known master, or even to what is normally
regarded as architectural detailing. The frame is
baldly expressed, emphasising only the cellular na¬
ture of the contents.yrhe infilling of the frame is in
simple brickwork, windows, or balustrading. Before
the building was completed the handling of the fa¬
cades was described on more than one occasion as
‘fashionable’ or ‘cliche-ridden’. For a certain period
of the design process the architects were advised
by John Forrester, an abstract sculptor, but neither
this, nor the influence of fashion seem to have had
much effect — it simply looks as if the architects had
more important things on their minds than facade-
patterns. Jack Lynn, indeed, has publicly stated that
the arrangement of the interiors was allowed to de¬
termine the exterior pattern of solid and void, and
that he is happy with the result. Not, one presumes,
like an old time functionalist morally secure in the
knowledge that form has followed function, but more
in the mood of one who sees it helping to build
the image of a building more concerned with ‘life’
than with ‘architecture’.
For, regard it how you will, Park Hill comes pretty
close to ‘an other architecture’. Its informal plan-
pattern on the ground is more concerned with a
proper topological organisation of the site than with
Picturesque effect. Indeed its level roof line has an
anti-Picturesque quality as one sees the block from
the city, though some extremely picturesque sil¬
houettes should be presented by the second phase,
Hyde Park, higher up the hill behind it. Hyde Park is
also less rigorously organised in terms of topologi¬
cal connections than Park Hill, and the accommoda¬
tion is grouped in a more conventional manner in
high and low blocks. In other words it is housing,
not a habitat, and marks a withdrawal from the ex¬
treme position established by Park Hill.
The moral crusade of Brutalism for a better habitat
through built environment probably reaches its cul¬
mination at Park Hill. Nothing proposed since has
been extreme in quite the same way, but many of
its ideas are diffusing into common usage, just as
the aesthetics of ‘beton brut’ have diffused into a
vernacular, a common usage. Brutalism, having run
for ten years or more — which is a fair age for an
‘-ism’ in the present century — had achieved the
consummation that awaits all movements which ac¬
curately pinpoint real needs and aspirations of their
period and social context. They do not achieve the
dominance for which their founders hope, but instead
they “melt into the history of their time”, so that one
can hardly imagine what the world could have been
like before Brutalism (in this case) came upon the
scene. The face of the world does not conform to
the Brutalist aesthetic, but the conscience of the
world’s architecture has been permanently enriched
; by the Brutalist ethic.
196
Sheffield City Architect’s Department
(J. Lewis Womersley, City Architect);
Sheffield (England), Hyde Park Housing.
1961-66
View of the model
132
133
9.1 Memoirs of a survivor
For illustrations see page 189—192
The reader will have deduced, if he did not already
know, that this book is the work of someone fairly
deeply involved with the events it describes. I have,
in fact, been personally acquainted with most of the
British Brutalists and quasi-Brutalists mentioned in
the preceding pages, since 1952 or earlier; my per¬
sonal acquaintance with the non-British architects
mentioned is more various, and in one or two cases,
such as Kunio Mayekawa, completely non-existent —
to my profound regret. The book, therefore, has a
built-in bias toward the British contribution to Bru-
talism: it is not a dispassionate and Olympian sur¬
vey, conducted from the cool heights of an academic
ivory tower. I was there, involved, and the article I
wrote for the ‘Architectural Review’ in December
1955 under the title, simply, of The New Brutalism’
seems to have been regarded as a more relevant
manifesto for the movement than the Smithsons’ 1
statement of January in the same year.
The reason why I have not reprinted my article as
part of this book is that I do not believe it to be
truly representative of the state of the Brutalist
movement at that important time in its evolution. In
retrospect it reveals only too clearly my attempt to
father some of my own pet notions on the move¬
ment. Any reader who is interested enough to turn
it up should read it ‘cum grano salis’ as a description
of the New Brutalism. On the other hand, it retains
some validity as a demonstration of the kind of
intellectual climate in which discussions of the New
Brutalism, and of architecture in general, were con¬
ducted in London, by a certain circle, at that time.
It was an extraordinarily exciting period in the evo¬
lution of ideas in Britain, both in the portable arts
and in architecture — one of those unrepeatable epi¬
sodes whose importance is discernible even at the
time, although their full consequence cannot be
appreciated until much later. One of the ways in
which we were able to discern that something im¬
portant was afoot was in the notice that was taken
k
r
of our activities abroad — Philip Johnson’s interest
in Hunstanton school (see section 3) was far from
unique, and the predominantly British make-up of
Team-X was something of a recognition that British
architects had a special contribution to make.
In fact, to write a predominantly British account of
New Brutalism is not necessarily to be parochial or
chauvinistic. The origins of Brutalism ‘as a move¬
ment’ were British, and the fact was recognised, as
in Renato Pedio’s reference to England as its ‘na¬
tive land’ (see section 8.1). The British, too, left a
permanent imprint on the movement and on the
concept of Brutalism. It was, in short, the first
consequential British contribution to the living body
of architecture since the collapse of the 'English
Free Building’ of Voysey and Lethaby around 1910.
It was not, of course, a wholly British movement —
the world of architecture is now so closely-knit by
rapid communications that only chauvinism or ge¬
nuine irrelevance to world problems can keep a
movement (eg Neo-Liberty in Italy) successfully
l!
ii
shut up within the confines of one nation’s archi¬
tecture. But even if the high style of Brutalism is
Le Corbusier’s, the ethic behind the aesthetic was
British, and the creation of a vernacular Brutalism
was as much a British achievement as anybody
else’s — one may very properly ask oneself what
the achievement of Atelier 5 would have meant in a
world that did rtot include the Smithsons’ philoso-
phisings and Stirling and Gowan’s Ham Common
flats.
But, as I write this ‘envoi’, it is very clear that the
biggest and most important fact about the British
contribution to Brutalism is that it is over. Whether
or not the movement is still a going concern is
difficult to say — the future may have more surprises
like Marchiondi in store for us. But the recent works
of Stirling and Gowan, or the Smithsons, show far
less urgency of ethic or aesthetic than in the late
fifties. The Smithsons’ Economist building or (more
accurately) cluster, since it consists of three build¬
ings on a single podium, is a work of studied re¬
straint. It may offer a vision of a new community
structure, but it does so upon the basis of an
ancient Greek acropolis plan, and in maintaining the
scale and governing lines of tradition-bound St
James’s Street, on which it stands, it handles the
‘street idea’ very tenderly indeed. Far from being an
example of an ‘other’ architecture, this is a crafts-
manly exercise within the great tradition. In many
ways, Stirling and Gowan’s laboratory-block for Lei¬
cester University comes nearer to Brutalism in the
emotional sense of a rough, tough building, and in
the dramatic space-play of its sectional organisation
it carries still something of the aggressive informali¬
ty of the mood of the middle fifties. But stylistic
dependence on any building by Le Corbusier is
something it does not show at all. These are build¬
ings that belong to a different book. Their relaxed
assurance stamps them as works of maturity, the
maturity of original talents that may never need to
worry about the problem of style again, confident
now that this is something that will resolve itself in
the process of satisfying the needs for which the
building was created. It has been a privilege and an
education to be able to watch this process of ma¬
turation from close range, just as it has been a
salutary lesson to me as a critic historian to watch
a movement being created — to gain a glimpse
thereby, of the manner in which movements as por¬
tentous as Gothic architecture could start from the
interaction of a few lively minds around Bishop
Suger, or the art of the Renaissance from a group
of friends few enough to be listed in the dedication
to Alberti’s ‘Della Pittura’.
But the process of watching a movement in gestation
and growth was also a disappointment in the end.
For all its brave talk of ‘an ethic, not an aesthetic’
Brutalism never quite broke out of the aesthetic
frame of reference. For a short period, around
1953—55, it looked as if an ‘other architecture’ might
indeed emerge, entirely free of the professional pre¬
conceptions and prejudices that have encrusted ar¬
chitecture since it became ‘an art’. It looked for a
moment as if we might be on the threshold of an
utterly uninhibited functionalism, free, even, of the
machine aesthetic that had trapped the white archi¬
tecture of the thirties and made it impossible for
Gropius to reach through to the native American
machine ethic that might have broken the back of
the Beaux-Arts tradition that still cripples architec¬
tural thinking in America.
The Johnsons, Johansens and Rudolphs of the Ame¬
rican scene were quicker than I was to see that the
Brutalists were really their allies, not mine; com¬
mitted in the last resort to the classical tradition,
not the technological. For the ethic of the Brutalist
connection, like every reformist trend in architecture,
back through Adolf Loos, and William Morris, and
Carlo Lodoli and Colin Campbell, is backward-look¬
ing. Brutalism may make tremendous bold attempts
to bring the automobile phenomenon under control,
but in the last resort it is in order to recreate a pe¬
destrian city, as in the central piazza of Siedlung
Halen, the street-decks of Park Hill. The Appliance
House may make a brave effort to redomesticate
the new household gods in their gleaming white and
chromium case-work, but it does so by cramming
them into the traditional alcoves of the tokonama, or
Roman domestic altar; the house itself is still the
same kind of shelter as a primitive wattle hut, makes
no attempt to put these new household powers to
work to create human environment in any radically
new way.
The ethic of Brutalism was a campaign of ‘mens
sana in corpore sano’, but no-one should have doubt¬
ed that the mind and the body would prove, ulti¬
mately, to be the mind and body which had always
belonged to architecture. For a non-architect like
myself to expect them to be otherwise was naive.
I know now that architects who genuinely see how
narrow and restricting are the traditions of their
profession, normally get out of it, and become in¬
dustrial designers, real-eastate agents, systems-
engineers or any other discipline that enables them
to tangle with the ‘realities of the situation’, in a less
inhibited manner. But, for all that, I am not ungrate¬
ful to the Brutalists within their role as architects. If
we are to continue to have a world in which ‘archi¬
tect’ is a meaningful and productive category of
human being, then I would rather have the kind of
architect who has begun to emerge since Brutalism
has become a force in the land, especially the kind
of younger architect who has been trained under
men like Smithson, Gowan, Stirling, and knows what
the traditions of his professions are, and the manner
in which he can take a moral stand upon them in the
twentieth century. From the time of Berlage, and
even before that, the idea of a morality of design
has been one of the main motives for serious in¬
novation in Modern Architecture, and the Brutalist
proposition that it is even ‘possible’ to make a moral
stand about matters of design is an improvement on
the attitude of many architects in the previous two
or three generations. I make no pretence that I was
not seduced by the aesthetic of Brutalism, but the
lingering tradition of its ethical stand, the persistence
of an idea that the r elationship s__of__tJie..partS-^and
materials of a building are-a working morality —
this, for me, is the continuing validity of the New
Brutalism.
135
Part of the main facade
198 / 199
Plan, elevations, and section (scale 1:600)
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200-202
Luigi Figini and G;no Pollini; Milan (Italy),
Church of the Madonna dei Poveri. 1956
200
Detail of masonry-screen to upper part ol
View of crypt
>2
nave
139
203 - 205
Johannes H van den Broek and
Jacob B Bakema; Nagele (Holland),
Reformed Church. 1960
203 / 204
Exterior from the north, bell-tower
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140
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Sigurd Lewerentz; Stockholm (Sweden), M arl
206/207
Exterior views
^° 8 (right)
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209
Garden elev
210/211
Plans of gro
(scale 1 : 500
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2 residenc
3 receptioi
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6 office-sp
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Steps up from garden
217-220
Sir Leslie Martin and Colin St John Wilson
(with Patrick Hodgkinson); Cambridge
(England), Harvey Court Hostel. 1262
217
Site plan
218/219
View of inner court, canopy over entrance-
steps
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External structural frames
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Indoor play-space
235-241
A|do van Eyck; Amsterdam (Holland),
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233
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Atelier 5 (Erwin Fritz, Samuel Gerber, Rolf Hesterberg,
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Berne (Switzerland), Siedlung Halen. 1961
245 (left)
Roof-terraces of narrow-section apartments to east of central
square
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Elevations of narrow-section apartments
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7 bathroom
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Sections and plans of wide apartments
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Site plan and section (scale 1:2500)
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10-13 terraced housing
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The terraces from the east
173
269 - 273
Kiyonori Kikutake; Totsuka (Yokohama,
Japan), Tonogaya Apartments. 1956
269 / 270
Rear elevation by day and night
271
Plan of typical floor
273
Interior of an apartment
274/275
Ikuta, Oki and Miyajima; Omiya (Saitama,
Japan), Fuji Juko Omiya Development.
1957
274
View north from main block
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la
ass**"
5 lift;:?, to;
View from harbour
276 - 284
Kunio Mayekawa; Harumi (Tokyo, Japan), Apartment Block. 1958
276 (page 177)
Part of garden elevation
277
Street elevation
Plans at standard floor level and street-deck level (scale 1 -500)
Close up of concrete work
IIm
mmm \
(Jiiiiii
j| ,Ki i «-fl f
lir j
|| Jfl 1
r
«!»■
%-J
iiii H-
1 1 Bj
285-297
Sheffield City Architect’s Department
(J Lewis Womersley, City Architect;
Jack Lynn, Ivor Smith and Frederick Nicklin
designers); Sheffield (England),
Park Hill Development. 1961
285
Lift-tower, stair-tov/er. and pedestrian
bridges
Park Hill from tho city-centre
west
south
the
from
view
182
300
200
owing street decks in solid
289
Standard three-storey section (scale 1 200)
290 292
Plans at upper floor level street deck level and lower floor level
< scale 1:200)
feet
—
184
l j
PI
i
' /
J
i
185
Street-deck passing through block
s in upper courtyard
-- 1
_
i r
L 1
t ••
!
J
,L
KiJ
r l
Ij;
r-HlIcP
301-303
James Stirling and James Gowan;
Leicester (England), University
Engineering-laboratories. 1963
301
Workshop block
298-300
Alison and Peter Smithson; London (England), Economist Cluster.
1964
298 (page 189)
View from St James’s Street
Model of complete desi
Stairway and periodicals reading-room
Detail of columns in
303 (page 192)
Lecture halls, laboratory-tower and
office-tower from the east
4 -bp
m
. v_
La
___
_i L-ft-'.*.
—
Index of Names in the Text
Aalto, Alvar
Alberti, Leon Battista
Alloway, Lawrence
Amis, Kingsley
Amis, Stanley
Asplund, Gunnar
Asplund, Hans
Atbat-Afrique
Atelier 5
Bakema, Jacob B
Banfi, Gianluigi
Banham, Reyner
BBPR
Behrens, Peter
Belgiojoso, Lodovico B
Berlage, Hendrik Petrus
Bodiansky, Vladimir
Bresciani, Valdes, Castillo
and Huidobro
Brown, Neave
Burlington, Lord
Buys, J W E
Campbell, Colin
Candilis, Georges
Casson, Sir Hugh
Cezanne, Paul
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon
Chareau, Pierre
Clark, H F
Clarke-Hall, Denis
Coates, Wells
Colquhoun, Alan
Conolly, Cyril
Coulon, Jacques
Cowburn, William
Cox, Oliver
Cronin Hastings, H de
Crosby, Theo
Cullen, Gordon
Dubuffet, Jean
Edman, Bengt
Ellis, Tom
Fautrier, Jean
Fehn, Sverre
Figini, Luigi
FSrderer, Walter
Forrester, John
Freyssinet, Eug&ne
Fritz, Erwin
Fuller, R Buckminster
Gardella, Ignazio
Gamier, Tony
Gerber, Samuel
Gibberd, Frederick
Giedion, Sigfried
Gollins, Melvin, Ward
Gowan, James
Greene, Herb
Gropius, Walter
Grung, Geir
Gutmann, R
Hamilton, Richard
Hardy, Alex
Haring, Hugo
Harrison, Norman
Henderson, Nigel
Hesterberg, Rolf
Hodgkinson, Patrick
Holm, Lennart
Hostettler, Hans
193
14, 47, 75
134
47, 64, 75
14
87
10
10, 11, 19, 125
47
90, 91, 130, 134
45, 70, 71,75, 125
128, 129
127
128, 129
45
128, 129
135
47
90
90, 130
15
128
19, 135
70, 71,75
13, 14
47
41
17
12, 75
19
14
14, 89
13
65
45
10, 11
75
45, 46, 71
75
61, 66, 68
10
89
61
125
125
91
132
16
90
69
71
45
90
13
10, 63, 71
42
87, 88, 89, 90, 125, 134, 135
68, 69
11,46, 47, 63, 71,72, 74,135
125
70
64, 66
126
14, 125
67
41, 43 , 61, 64, 65, 66, 71
90
126
10
90
Howell, William G
Huws, David
Ikuta, Oki and Miyajima
Israel, Lawrence
Johansen, John M
Johnson, Philip
Kahn, Louis I
Kallman, Gerhard
Kawazoe, Noboru
Kidder Smith, G E
Kiesler, Frederick
Kikutake, Kiyonori
Korsmo, Arne
Kruschev, Nikita
Kultermann, Udo
Lasdun, Denys
Lasserre, Fred
Le Corbusier
Lethaby, William Richard
Lewerentz, Sigurd
Littlewood, Joan
Llewelyn-Davies, Richard
Lodoli, Carlo
Loos, Adolf
Lorraine, Claude
Lubetkin, Berthold
Luder, Owen
Lurpat, Andr6
Lynch, Kevin
Lynn, Jack
Lyons, Israel and Ellis
Malevitsch, Kasimir
Mansart, Jules Hardouin
Mar6, Eric de
Martin, Sir Leslie
Mathieu, Georges
Mayekawa, Kunio
McCallum, Ian
McHale, John
Mendelsohn, Erich
Michelangelo
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig
Neutra, Richard
Newman, Oscar
Nizzoli, Marcello
Olitsky, Ruth
Otto, Rolf
Palladio, Andrea
Paolozzi, Edouardo
Pedio, Renato
Peressutti, Enrico
Perret, Auguste
Pevsner, Nikolaus
Phidias
Picasso, Pablo
Pini, Alfredo
Piper, John
Pollini, Gino
70, 75, 87
14
130
89
135
14, 20, 65, 67,134, 135
43, 44, 89, 125
18
131
125
68, 69
130
125
11,12, 89
68
72, 85, 89
67, 69
14,15,16,17,18, 19, 41,42,
43, 44, 45, 47, 62, 63, 69, 70,
71, 72, 73, 75, 85, 86, 88, 89,
90, 91,125,130,131,132,
134
134
125
43
18, 19, 47
135 »
20,135
12
14
89
16
72
42, 88, 132
89
126
16
10
126
61
46, 71,130,131,134
44
64, 66
125
16
10, 14,15, 17,18,19, 45,
69, 126
72
89
18, 45
90
89
11, 135
72
70
63
15
91
15, 19, 41,45, 87
41, 43, 45, 61, 64, 66,
86
127, 134
128, 129
16,131
12, 13, 14,19, 90, 128
16
47
90
13
125
Mikoyan, Anastasij Ivanovitch
Miller, John
Mondriaan, Piet
Morgenthaler, Niklaus
Moro, Peter
Morris, William
Si
Photographers
As far as was traceable the photographs were made by the
following photographers:
No. of
illustration
2 LCC, Architect’s Dept., Photographic Unit
3 LCC, Architect’s Dept., Photographic Unit
4 Wainwright
5 Architectural Review — Millar &. Harris, London
6 Architect’s Journal - Millar & Harris, London
7 Architect’s Journal - Millar & Harris, London
8 Lucien Herv6, Paris
12 Lucien Herv6, Paris
13 Lucien Herv6, Paris
15 Lucien Herv6, Paris
16 Lucien Herv6, Paris
17 Lucien Herv6, Paris
18 Lucien Herv6, Paris
19 Lucien Herv6, Paris
20 Lucien Herv6, Paris
21 Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago
23 Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago
24 Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago
25 Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago
26 Hedrich-Blessing, Chicago
28 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
29 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
30 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
31 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
32 E. E. Swain, Hunstanton
38 Architectural Review - E. E. Swain, Hunstanton
39 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
40 Architectural Review — de Burgh Galwey
41 John Maltby, London
42 P. D. S.
43 Nigel Henderson
44 Nigel Henderson
45 Nigel Henderson
46 Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, Tubingen
50 Nigel Henderson
58 John Maltby, London
59 Architect’s Journal - Sydney W. Newbery, London
60 Cervin Robinson
61 Charles R. Schulze
63 Lionel Freedman, New York
64 J. A. Vrijhof, Rotterdam
71 Nigel Henderson
73 Hans Namuth
74 The Council of Industrial Design, London
79 The Council of Industrial Design, London
80 Son et Lumifcre
82 Architectural Design - Sam Lambert, London
83 Architectural Design - Sam Lambert, London
84 Architects’ Journal - Sam Lambert, London
86 dp^- Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH, Frankfurt/Main
87 Collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York
88 Julius Shulman, Los Angeles
89 Buckminster Fuller, Forest Hills, N. Y.
90 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
91 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
100 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
104 Denys Lasdun
120 Lucien Herv6, Paris
132 Lucien Herv6, Paris
133 Lucien Herv6, Paris
134 Lucien Herv6, Paris
135 Lucien Herv6, Paris
136 Lucien Herv6, Paris
137 Lucien Herv6, Paris
138 Lucien Herv6, Paris
139 Lucien Herv6, Paris
141 Peter Pitt
142 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
143 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
144 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
145 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
146 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
147 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
148 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
149 de Burgh Galwey
153 Architectural Review - John R. Pantlin, Radlett
158 Architectural Review - John R. Pantlin, Radlett
159 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
162 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
163 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
164 Deegan Photo Ltd.
166 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
167 Architects' Journal - Wm. J. Toomey
168 Architects’ Journal - Wm. J. Toomey
169 Architects’ Journal - Wm. J. Toomey
170 Architects’ Journal - Wm. J. Toomey
171 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
172 Behr Photography, London
174 Architectural Review — de Burgh Galwey
175 LCC, Architect's Dept., Photographic Unit
176 LCC, Sydney W. Newbery, London
177 Architects’ Journal - John R. Pantlin, Radlett
178 Architectural Review — de Burgh Galwey
179 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
180 Pedro Freitag, Osomo
181 Pedro Freitag, Osorno
182 Pedro Freitag, Osorno
185 Albert Winkler, Bern
186 Albert Winkler, Bern
187 Albert Winkler, Bern
188 Albert Winkler, Bern
189 Albert Winkler, Bern
190 Lucien Herv6, Paris
191 F. Maurer, ZUrich
192 F. Maurer, ZUrich
195 The Architectural Press
196 Sheffield Telegraph Ltd.
200 Fototecnica Fortunati, Milano
201 Fototecnica Fortunati, Milano
202 Fototecnica Fortunati, Milano
204 Publicam, Hilversum
205 Publicam, Hilversum
206 Pal-Nils Nilsson/Tiofoto, Stockholm
207 Pal-Nils Nilsson/Tiofoto, Stockholm
208 Pal-Nils Nilsson/Tiofoto, Stockholm
209 Walter Ehmann, Kdln
216 Sam Lambert, London
218 John Donat
219 John Donat
220 John Donat
221 Colin Westwood, Weybridge
223 Colin Westwood, Weybridge
224 Colin Westwood, Weybridge
230 Attualfoto, Milano
231 Attualfoto, Milano
235 J. J. van der Meyden, Amsterdam
236 J. J. van der Meyden, Amsterdam
237 P. H. Goedi, Amsterdam
239 Violette Cornelius
241 J. J. van der Meyden, Amsterdam
242 John D. Fowler
243 Bob O’Shaughnessy, Boston
244 John D. Fowler
245 Albert Winkler, Bern
246 Albert Winkler, Bern
247 Albert Winkler, Bern
263 Albert Winkler, Bern
264 Albert Winkler, Bern
266 Albert Winkler, Bern
267 Leonardo Bezzola, Flamatt
268 Leonardo Bezzola, Flamatt
274 Ch. Hirayama, Tokyo
275 Ch. Hirayama, Tokyo
276 Y. Futagawa, Tokyo
277 Ch. Hirayama, Tokyo
280 Y. Futagawa, Tokyo
281 Y. Futagawa, Tokyo
282 Y. Futagawa, Tokyo
283 Y. Futagawa, Tokyo
195
286 Bellwood Photography, Sheffield
287 Architectural Review - Wm. J. Toomey
293 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
294 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
295 Architectural Review - Reyner Banham
296 Architectural Review - Reyner Banham
297 Architectural Review - Reyner Banham
298 Architects’ Journal - Wm. J. Toomey
299 John Maltby, London
300 Architects’ Journal — Wm. J. Toomey
301 Architects' Journal — Sam Lambert, London
302 Architects' Journal - Sam Lambert, London
303 Architectural Review - de Burgh Galwey
The illustrations of the Corbusier buildings (except photographs)
are taken from the ‘Oeuvre complete’ and are reproduced here
with kind permission of the publisher Dr H Girsberger.
By the same author
Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age
by Reyner Banham, PH.D.
Size 9x6 ins. 296 pages, with 150 illustra¬
tions. Second impression.
Price 45s. net. (Postage 3s. Od.)
The purpose of this book is to document and annotate
for the first time the development of design in the
first machine age as a narrative of men and ideas;
to trace from the training of the masters (Gropius,
Mendelsohn, Mies, Le Corbusier) in the years around
1910 to their maturity around 1930, their contacts with
one another, with pioneer spirits in the other arts. In
127,000 words of text Dr Banham takes architecture as
his main theme, but at the same time deals with
industrial design generally, together with painting
and sculpture; in being scholarly he is far from dull
and has written a most lively and readable book.
Guide to Modern Architecture
by Reyner Banham, PH.D.
Size 7 3 A x TU ins. 160 pages with over 150
illustrations.
Price 25s. net. (Postage Is. 3d.)
In most countries, modern buildings now form an
appreciable part of the backdrop to everyday life. Yet
their critics cannot distinguish bad ones from good,
and their supporters are liable to be told to sit down
and shut up, if they venture a word of praise. This
book lets some light into the situation, by briefly ex¬
plaining the elements that make up a modern build¬
ing (function, form, construction and space) and by
illustrating and commenting on a world-wide, highly
diverse selection of modern buildings. The result
is a lively justification of the author’s claifn that
modern architecture should not be difficult to appre¬
ciate, because it is ’like any other architecture only
more so: it has more things to say and more ways of
saying them.
Architectural Press, London
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